Vampire$

Chapter 1

They were all there when Crow and his Team came rolling in for that last job. All the policemen and local officials. The mayor. The school board. It was that kind of small Indiana town.

It was that kind of hot summer day, too. The crowd faded quickly back from the billowing dust raised by the semis on the milk-white gravel driveway, holding hankies to their faces and coughing. Then they stood on the brown grass and watched the procession circle deafeningly around them and pull up in front of the great house.

The engines on all five vehicles stopped at once. Jack Crow stepped from the lead Jeep and stood there, all six-feet-two of muscle and resolve and mean. He stood for a moment, glancing up at the target. When he turned back the local officials stood about him in a semicircle, as if for warmth.

In fact for warmth.

Crow smiled easily at them. He shook hands with the round nervous-faced mayor. He glanced at his watch. It was high noon and 105 degrees.

Time to start killing.

They dynamited the south wing ten minutes later. The charge went off on a second-story balcony and drove the entire section flat to the ground like an angry fist. There was a lot more smoke, a lot more dust. They waited. Soon it was sunny again. The grapples began snagging at the wreckage and dragging it away.

The townsmen watched it all, wincing at the first screech of steel members on the masonry. They watched the machinery lumbering into position. They watched the crew of five appear from the van with their eight-foot-long pikes and stand ready. Mostly, they watched Crow.

They probably didn’t jump more than a foot the first time the rubble moved on its own.

“Boss!” called a young blond man named Cat from his lawn chair crow’s nest atop one of the semis. “I think we have one.” He stood up, shading his eyes against the bright sunlight and pointing. “Right there on the end.”

“Okay,” replied Crow calmly. “Rock and roll.”

The crew moved into position encircling the area as best as the broken shard footing allowed. From their back pockets they took what looked like women’s long opera gloves and put them on. The steel mesh fabric glinted brightly. The townsmen, probably without realizing it, stepped closer together.

Then Crow, dragging cable from the broad grapple clenched in his huge right fist, stepped through the circle of his men and stabbed a prong deep into the cornice lodged heavily over the target area. He stepped back and held out his left hand. Somebody handed him a crossbow the size of a swingset and then everybody just stood there for a moment.

It started almost the instant Jack’s signal to the crane pulled the cable taut. The masonry had barely tilted to one side when the first fiend came whistling and smoking into the agony of the sun’s rays, shrieking like a harpy and stabbing out with black claws and dead gray fangs and then spouting a vile black glob as Crow’s first shot drove a bolt the size of a baseball bat through its chest and spine and eight inches into the cornice behind it.

It writhed and howled and burned and cried and dragged with maniacal frenzy at the wooden stake, but the umbrella barbs kept it lodged tight, killing it, killing it, rubbing it away from the world of earth and man and bright summer Indiana afternoons.

“Now that,” offered Cat after several seconds of heavy silence, “was weird.”

The mayor turned to the elder town councilman and chuckled. The latter responded in kind. Soon all the townsmen were laughing and laughing with the break of the tension and with the relief that maybe after all the horror of the past months and — And nobody else was laughing. Not Cat, peering disgustedly down from his perch above them, none of the other members of the crew, and not Jack Crow, whose look of withering disdain turned them pale to a man.

When they had gotten very quiet for a very long five seconds Jack said, “The leader shouldn’t have popped first. He usually sends everyone else ahead.”

“How…” began the mayor before his voice cracked. cleared his dry throat and tried again. “How do you know it was the leader?”

Jack lit a cigarette and stared at the ground. “After a while,” he replied softly, “you can tell.”

He stood there quietly like that for several seconds. Then he looked at them, actually looked at the individual townsmen for the first time.

It had wilted them. The horror, the losses, the sense of total naked impotence.

Wilted.

And it was only going to get worse.

So what, he thought next, are you gonna do when it’s over, gents? When your town has seen you as worthless and craven and you feel your manhood has been stomped?

Are you gonna do what others have tried?

Are you gonna take it out on us?

When it’s over, are you going to cheat us to show you’re still men?

Because it really is gonna get worse. That was just the first one.

“All right,” he barked abruptly, clapping his hands sharply together.

“Let’s get on with it. Rock and roll.”

And they did. And it did get worse. The second eruption was a howler and a screecher, again vile and terrifyingly fast, and the black bloody flecks fountained when the bolt struck it and slammed it back down and still it would not die until long seconds after one of the crew had punctured its skull with his pike.

It was horribly gruesome.

It was a broad-daylight nightmare.

It was a woman each townsman had known for over forty years.

After the schoolteacher came the local postmaster, the prom queen and her fullback fiancé, some hapless young college girl with the irreversible misfortune to blow a tire on a country lane that actually was dark and long but only appeared empty.

The usual. But there was something wrong with the proportions.

“Nine in all, counting the leader,” said Anthony reading from Cat’s clipboard an hour and a half after the last appearance. “But only three goons.” He looked up from the page at his boss. “They weren’t very busy, were they?”

Crow took the clipboard from his hand and glanced at it. “Nope,” was his only response.

Both men looked up at the sound of the Jeep returning up the driveway bearing Cat and the graveyard team. One of the townsmen approached them while they unloaded empty cans of soil coagulant and tossed them into the back of the semi.

“Do you think there’s another pit somewhere?” asked Anthony after a few seconds.

Crow looked at his questioner, whose bull neck and massive shoulders remained taut from the pressure of the day. Crow decided he looked awful after five hours of slaughter, decided that was probably good.

“No,” he answered. “This is it. I never heard of them keeping goons somewhere else. New ones need to be around the leader anyway.”

“Then how come—”

“Dammit, Anthony! I don’t know why they didn’t turn more recently. Maybe they had something else to do.”

“Like what?” Anthony wanted to know.

Crow sighed. They always came to him with questions like this. He was the elder veteran, three years at it now, and probably had, in fact, the longest career of this type in the world. But that didn’t mean he knew shit about vampires. Nobody knew shit about vampires. Nobody lived long enough to learn, and it pissed him off the way they all looked at him to know all the answers. What right did they — he caught himself, took a deep breath. He looked again at Anthony, who had been an all-pro outside linebacker with the Seattle Seahawks when Crow had hired him. A man who was deeply loyal, sharply intelligent, and one of the bravest human beings he had ever seen, and who goddamn well deserved an answer from the man who claimed to be his boss and leader.

“I’m sorry, buddy. I just don’t know.”

Crow told the pikemen to stand at ease, brought the demo bunch in to punch the last of the charges deep into the rubble and went over to talk to Cat who still stood chattering away with the townsmen. On the way he passed the local priest, Father Hernandez, stepping dully forward to turn his trick over the nine piles of ashes. Crow swallowed the resentment the old man’s sighing gait brought up in him.

“Priests call it Joplin juice on account of Carl Joplin, the guy who put it together for us,” Cat was saying to the mayor and another man whose name Crow didn’t recall. “It just makes it hard to climb up out of. Even without it, y’know, it’s too hard for most of ’em. Getting the damn coffin open at all is most of it. Remember—”

“Cherry Cat!” Crow called abruptly, not being able to stand it any longer. The townsmen, who just hours before had been too frightened to speak, were now full of patronizing pretend-interest questions about procedure. It was the kind of transition Crow had expected since noon, of course, but that didn’t make it any better.

Cat excused himself and stepped through their disapproving looks. Crow put an arm about Cat’s shoulders and turned away with him, speaking in an obvious but inaudible whisper sure to be taken as the insult it was.

“Don’t you see what’s happening, goddammit?”

Cat sighed. “Yeah.” He looked hurt. And was, Crow reminded himself with more than a little amazement. “Damn,” continued Cat, “I liked these people. Y’know that banker guy, Foster? He’s planning to build—”

“Planning to cheat your ass blind and mine both.”

Cat frowned. He glanced in the direction of the townsmen without seeing them.

“Yeah,” said Cat at last.

They lit cigarettes and started walking toward the trucks.

“But, y’know, Jack? Not really,” cried Cat in an abrupt plaintive whisper. “They’re just trying to pull themselves up outta the hole they’re in.” He stopped. “You’re the one who told me all this yourself.”

Crow was adamant. “Then they shouldn’t have got themselves in the hole in the first place.”

“The vampires did that, Jack.”

“Like hell they did. No sympathy, Cat. If they’d had the damn guts to face it… And now they’re trying to take it out on us for doing it for them.”

“Right in front of them, and the whole town. Their town.”

Crow stopped and looked back the way they came. “No sympathy,” he repeated.

“Look, just because they’re feeling a little… I don’t know — ashamed, I guess—”

“Did it ever occur to you that they have something to be ashamed about?”

They were silent for several seconds.

“All tight,” said Cat at last with a sigh. “I’ll get it ready.”

Crow shook his head. “No need. Not this time. I’m not gonna put up with this shit this time.”

Cat eyed him briefly. “Just the same I think I oughta—”

“No, dammit!” Crow all but shouted. “Look! I’m so tired of these bastards crawling over and begging us on bended knees because they aren’t man enough to stand up to the creatures turning their wives and daughters into blood-whores. And then they try to pretend they aren’t groveling little cretins by haggling over the price, like this is just another business deal, this had nothing to do with the fact that we just cratered when it counted.”

Crow stopped and panted with the anger, slamming his cigarette to the ground and lighting another.

Cat waited him out until he was calm. “Well, just in case,” he began as casually as so guileless a man could, “I’ll set up the—”

“Do what you want,” Crow interrupted fiercely. “But I’m telling you I’ve fucking had it with these twerps and all the others like ’em. I’m putting my foot down.” He jabbed his trembling index finger under Cat’s nose. “Do you hear me?”

Cat nodded meekly. “I hear you.”

Crow nodded with satisfaction. He tossed his new cigarette to the ground, hitched up his pants, and stalked toward the circle of men still at the Jeep. He paused and jerked a ferocious glance back at his friend. “I’m putting my foot down!” he snarled.

Then he stalked ahead even faster. Halfway to the townsmen, Cat overheard his harsh whisper to himself: “Putting it fucking down!”

Chapter 2

It was a nice jail — if you liked old westerns.

Crow’s cell reminded him of every Rifleman he’d ever seen. It had a cot, a stool, a chamber pot without a lid, and a door that required the keys to the city to open it.

But the deputy was something so special it was almost worth it.

The deputy was a miracle.

To begin with, he had a gut Crow considered an anatomical triumph. But it was in the region of nose-picking where the man achieved greatness. Never in his lifetime (and, he suspected, anyone else’s) had Crow seen anybody pick his nose with such fervor — not to mention tangible results — for so many hours at a stretch.

He had other virtues. Besides being a social slug he was also the town bully. During his first hour in the slammer Crow saw him grovel obscenely to his mayor’s son-in-law, thump a large red-stoned ring off the crown of some high-schooler for being late to pay a parking ticket, and smash Jack’s fingers with a reinforced flashlight to keep them off the bars.

The idea of killing him made Crow feel all warm and tingly. It made the hours bearable. Or rather, setting him up did. “Bullies don’t like to fight,” Crow’s grandaddy had long ago told him. “Bullies are scared of fighting. Bullies like to beat people up.” Keeping this in mind, Crow worked on a plan for the first hours. He decided at last on whining.

He whined about being shut up in the jail, about being cheated by all “those rich guys who think they’re such a big deal ’cause they got money.” He whined about the food — or lack of it — claiming he was starving. He whined about the taste of the water and the smell of the chamber pot and suggested a connection.

He said his fingers hurt, sucked them loudly and often, held them up to show how swollen they were, and demanded to see a doctor.

The third time the deputy told him to shut up it was a snarl.

Crow’s reply was equally ferocious. “Make me, fatso!” he snapped back but dropped his eyes when he did.

The deputy smiled, and stood with the flashlight in hand. He stepped around the desk smacking the weapon rhythmically into his fat palm.

“Maybe I will,” he purred menacingly.

Crow took a half-step back from the bars, appeared to catch himself, stepped back up, and declared, “I ain’t scared of you!” in the least convincing tone he could muster.

It was bully heaven. The deputy’s little pig eyes gleamed as he reached for the keys. His yellow front teeth — all three of them — were bared with delight as he saw the prisoner backing to the far wall of the cell. But when he opened the door of the cell his raspy fat-punk voice changed from a smug chortle to a clear-bell high-pitched scream.

Crow bounced him across the desktop.

The deputy pulled himself up off the splintered remains of the desk chair and peeked over the desk in shock. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him.

It was.

Crow didn’t hurt him. He just dribbled him about the office floor long enough to make him start to cry. Then he put him in the cell.

From the middle desk drawer he took an army Colt and an extra clip. He looked longingly at the telephone, wanting desperately to talk to Cat. But there was no way of telling who would answer the phone at the motel. Hell, he hadn’t heard from the rest of his team the whole time he’d been in the slammer. There should have been the usual effort to get him… Then he remembered his braying at Cat about not needing help. But surely Cat hadn’t listened. On the other hand, Cherry Cat had the most infuriating habit of obeying him at the worst conceivable times. Damn.

He forgot the idea of calling. Best just get the hell away from the damn police station. He stuck the automatic down deep in his belt and headed to the door. He gave the deputy a little salute. “See ya, Homer. It’s been real.”

“How,” whimpered the deputy like the blob he was, “did you know my name was Homer?”

Crow laughed and eyed the heavens. “There is a God,” he whispered to himself. “And He’s got a sense of humor.”

Then he dropped all other thoughts. He keyed off the lights in the room, took a deep breath, and put his hand on the door.

“All right,” he hissed, “rock and roll, dammit!” and jerked it open.

On the sidewalk outside the jail stood every cop in the world.

It was not Jack’s best moment.

“Stop him, please!” cried a man Crow recognized as Banker Foster, and the cops surged forward en masse. Crow thought about the automatic in his belt, thought about the odds of winning, about the idea of shooting any policeman under any circumstances, muttered “Shit,” and lifted his arms over his head.

“No! No!” shouted the mayor, elbowing his way through the eager constables, “not him!” He grabbed Crow by the upper arm and tugged on it like a child. “Mr. Crow, stop him!” he pleaded and turned and pointed across the street to the town square.

The crowd parted with the gesture and Crow could see, at last, his team. They had the crane set up on its highest elevation clamped onto their longest pike, which ran straight down from the starry sky into the chest of a vampire writhing and hissing on the base of the statue of the town’s founder.

Anthony, standing on the hood of the Jeep, had his arm poised meaningfully in the air ready to signal the crane operator, who was even now taking out the slack in the cable.

“Let him go!” roared Anthony, “or we’ll start your troubles all over again!”

Crow eyed the “vampire” as it spat and arched and wondered idly why they never recognized Cat in gray makeup. Then he turned to the mayor and said, “Well, what’s it gonna be? Do we get paid or not?”

“Really, Mr. Crow!” spouted Banker Foster, “there was never a question about paying your fee, as such. It was just that the expenses seemed somewhat—”

“Foster, you are such a goddamn bore,” Crow drawled. He turned to the mayor. “Yes or no?”

“Yes” was decided upon. The procession made its way across the square to the bank. Anthony walked side by side with Crow, but every other member of the team — especially the crane operator and the still-writhing (and now silently giggling) Cat — stayed firmly in place. Crow noticed that there really weren’t as many cops as he had at first thought. Perhaps a half-dozen or so counting state troopers and the sheriff’s real deputies. The rest were the same crowd present at the mansion all afternoon.

There was some trouble at the bank door, it being ten o’clock at night. Banker Foster claimed he had no keys on his person and suggested they all wait until the next morning and while he chattered away about the door Sheriff Ortega kicked it in with a size-thirteen Tony Lama. It wasn’t so much the kick that won Crow’s heart but the mischievous grin on Ortega’s face while he was doing it.

The vault itself, time lock and all, was a different problem but one Crow & Co. had met before. “You got a cashier’s check machine, don’t you?” Anthony asked bluntly. So the check was made out and Crow endorsed it and gave it to gray-faced Cat amidst a surprising amount of good-natured laughter — especially from the cops — and Cat drove away to mail it from any other nearby township.

Though Jack Crow was something less than a PR wizard, neither was he a complete fool. “Party time,” he announced gaily, being sure to invite each and every one of the city fathers and cops present. Most accepted. The liquor store owner was persuaded by Ortega’s dead-eyed smile to give Jack credit. The “store,” as befitted a dry county in a God-fearing state, had no sign but was amply stocked. By now everyone was getting into the spirit of the thing. It took only twenty minutes to overload the Jeep with everybody helping.

“To the motel! — hoa!” cried wagonmaster Ortega, waving a bottle of bourbon from the window of his patrol car — Chevy pickup.

“Rock and roll!” chirped the little mayor who then blushed while everyone else laughed and cheered.

And the party began.

Chapter 3

The crossbow bolt through the Dr Pepper machine aroused the motel manager from his bed to find Crow and Sheriff Ortega — arms around shoulders, swaying gently in unison — outside his office.

“We wuz outta change,” said Ortega. The sheriff was being helpful.

“I can vouch for him on tha’ one,” added Crow, and they grinned at each other and pounded backs.

The manager simply stared. This (to be kind) bizarre sight of two giants grinning down at him — and worse, nodding so fiercely at him out of synch it looked like a pair of paddling heads — it was all too much. The manager went back to his bed and pulled his pillow down over his ears.

There were equally valid excuses for most of the other destruction. High spirits could be blamed for some of it, true enough. And carelessness. But most of the sheer carnage was entirely unavoidable due to the very nature of competitive sports at this, the Championship level. The list of events included Spin the Coffee Table, Pike Vaulting and the ever-popular Ash Tray Rug Hockey. All of this being merely ancillary to the main event: Drinking Yourself Blind While Waiting for The Goddamn Whores to Show Up, which, as everyone knows, is strenuous enough by definition and only becomes uglier the longer it takes.

All in all they did $5,000 worth of damage to the motel.

It was a lot of fun.

The party started out with about two dozen members, counting Team Crow, the locals, and the cops. It later swelled to about fifty or so. But by 3 A.M. it was back down to the twenty or so serious-minded. Father Hernandez turned out to be hilariously funny. He sang dirty limericks in Spanish and English. Most thought that a little weird. But it turned out that Hernandez had once been a real father, as in husband, with two little girls and a red-haired wife — all of whom had died of bubonic plague, of all things, twenty years before in northwestern Mexico.

Everybody got real misty about that and drank to their passing, and each man present agreed privately to stop calling him “Nutless.”

They got a lot more depressed when a towheaded kid named, no shit, Bambi, who had wandered into the party some hours earlier from who knows where, started to cry about Hernandez’s lost family. This pissed Crow off. He was already in a bad mood on account of the sheriff’s badge and gun. Actually he liked wearing the badge pretty much. It was shiny and made him feel official and all and reminded him of which pocket his cigarettes were in. But the gun was one of these forty-four magnum artillery types two inches longer than his waist and every time he sat down the barrel would dig him in the balls causing him to yelp and leap to his feet to rub ’em and that only reminded him that the whores still weren’t there and on and on and on.

So this crying Bambi was too much on top of everything else. He cleared everybody off of the suite’s main sofa with one swipe of the back of his hand and unzipped the cover off the largest cushion. Then he stepped over and picked up the sobbing Bambi by both ears and tried to zip him up inside.

Anthony simply wouldn’t have this. “Show a little goddamn consideration, Jack!” he snorted and unfolded the kid from the cushion. Bambi rewarded Anthony by throwing his arms around the other’s neck, gurgling, “Thank ya, brother,” and vomiting onto his chest.

Anthony didn’t even get mad. He just took ’em both into what was left of the bathroom, cleaned them off, held Bambi’s head while be got sick in the tub. Then he carried him, still sobbing, in his arms back to the middle of the room and sat down and began to lecture everybody present about kindness, ending with two exquisitely pertinent statements:

“Showing a certain measure of respect and tenderness to your fellow human souls is the way a real man exhibits class” and “By the way, are the fucking bimbos gonna show up or not?”

The combination of statements sent Cat — long since returned and almost as long dead drunk — into a cackling frenzy. He held onto his sides and rolled back and forth kicking his feet.

The rest of the party stared at him in abject bewilderment. All, that is, except the sheriff. Ortega had been both stung and humiliated by the bimbo remark. Being sheriff, procurement was clearly his responsibility and them not showing up by now, almost 4:30, infuriated him.

But the telephone — that really enraged him. He’d been trying to call for two hours to see what the hold-up was but for the life of him he couldn’t get the sonuvabitch to work. He couldn’t even get a goddamned dial tone.

This in turn made David Deyo awfully guilty. Deyo, a member of the pike crew, had been responsible for tearing the phone out of the wall the first time hours earlier. A veteran of three years’ duty on the destroyer Hepburn, and therefore a man of breeding and culture, he had spent hours reconnecting the wires using his very best navy knot. But for some reason the phone still wouldn’t work.

A half-dozen of them got down on all fours to examine the situation. All agreed the knot was a thing of beauty and that the phone should by God phone. The real problem, of course, was that each of them had drunk enough to kill a steer. But this did not occur to anyone. Except maybe Cat, whose suddenly renewed cackling was a continuing mystery.

Somebody suggested using the phone in the next room. This was Cat’s turn to be helpful. “I’ll get it,” he screeched. He rose, reeling with laughter, and ricocheted into the adjoining bedroom, ripped out that phone and brought it in to be retied.

This one didn’t work either.

It was the phone company, everybody agreed. The phone company was fucked. And everybody had a drink to that.

It was starting to get really late. Only the hard core remained. Team Crow, three cops, including the sheriff, Father Hernandez, and Bambi. Somebody suggested going and getting the women, a Quest. That was cheered until somebody else pointed out that they were almost out of liquor.

One of the deputies reminded everybody of the time. The liquor store owner had long since locked up and gone home to bed. Then Ortega, desperate for redemption, allowed as how they had already robbed a bank, more or less, so knocking over a liquor store was no big deal.

“Whores first!” piped Bambi.

“I’m too drunk to fuck,” snarled Anthony, spilling Bambi onto his head and standing up.

Ortega stared at Anthony. “You’re kidding.”

“No kidding,” Anthony assured him. “I’m too drunk to do anything but drink.” He held up his index finger like a lecturer’s pointer. “And I gotta get sick first to do that. ’Scuse me.”

The spirit of comradeship rapidly degenerated into a squabble that sounded like two competing college cheering sections.

“Booze first!”

“No! Sex first!”

“Booze!”

“Sex!”

“Booze!”

“Sex!”

“Booze!”

Somebody yelled, “Less filling!” and got slapped around a great deal.

Then Bambi rose to the occasion. “I’ve got a van outside,” he piped gleefully. “We can go fill it full of both!”

“Yea!” shouted the crowd as Bambi took his bow, high-stepped carefully over to the door, opened it, and — And the vampire was on him and ripping his claws deep into his ribs and spreading them and then… it… pulled… his… chest… apart. Bambi died, screeching horror and spraying organs and blood and then clumped to the floor in a little pile and the vampire was on them, on the rest of them, coming at them too fast, too damn fast, too on fast to be believed, and the first guy, some member of the pike team, just had enough time to raise his forearm in front of his face before the fiend snapped it through and ripped him open from throat to shoulder and he screamed — Jesus God, how he screamed!

The bolts! Where’s the fucking crossbow? was all Crow could think and he spun around looking for it, taking his eyes off the fiend for a second because this was a vampire and that was the only way to stop it, the only way in the world and this was night! Nighttime and maybe that wouldn’t do it either but there it was, propped up against the end table under the lamp and Crow dove for it across the sofa full of horrified mortals, some of them just now rising to their feet because this was all so fast for them, this was just too… this couldn’t be happening, could it? I mean, we were just having a party and everything was just—

Crow crashed across the back of the sofa over the tops of somebody’s rising head and they flipped him sideways in the air in mid-dive and he came down right shoulder first onto the point of the bolt.

"God!” he gasped, as it sank into his tissue. He twisted to the side off of it and it tore loose raggedly from his skin and shirt. “God, God, God!” He was bleeding like crazy, agonizing pain, and the lamp teetered and fell to the carpet right beside his bead and started shorting out and then Crow rose to his knees blank-faced and beaten to watch the rest of the strobe-lit nightmare continue.

Darkness…

Light: David Deyo in mid-black-belt leap driving the side of his right foot picture-perfectly up under the vampire’s chin where the throat was soft and making the sound that would have popped the skull off any normal man—

Darkness…

Light: The fiend using David’s… oh, God! using his spine like a handle as he slammed him back and forth from the floor to the ceiling. David long dead already, all his bones crushed, flopping gruesomely and Anthony! Sweet Anthony with his huge shoulders slamming forward into the fiend, tackling him for chrissake like this was Astroturf and—

Darkness… And then crash in the blackness just a couple of feet away.

Light: Anthony’s body hanging on the sill of the shattered picture window and then sliding horribly, slowly, on through, his legs dragging the curtains pop-pop-pop — off the curtain rod to billow gently to the ground covering him and — Cat beside him, lifting him up, hissing, “Yes! Yes! Yes! The window!” as if that had been Anthony’s plan for escape all along.

“What…” stuttered Crow but he knew what Cat meant. They had to run. The fiend roared and slaughtered invincible in the night air. There was no chance, and he stumbled toward the window, Cat shoving him, grabbing him by the shoulder that already bled, and “Ohh!” spouted forth from Crow’s mouth with the pain and Cat said “Jack, you’re hurt!” in surprise and Crow mumbled back, “We’re all dead!”

And then more darkness and he was tumbling forward through the last of the glass and landing on something soft and dead like an old and trusted friend but not to think about it. He rose to his feet and turned for Cat, Cherry Cat, without whom there was no point anyway and — And it was light again for the last time and Cat was out and beside him and lifting him up and there — back there through the window was the priest, Father Hernandez, not nutless at all, stabbing the edge of his huge silver cross right into the fiend’s forehead before dying, decapitated, from a backhanded, almost casual, blow..

All blood and horror everywhere back there, on the walls and the ceiling and — And the sheriff, stunned into immobility, stood like a lump in the middle of the parking lot staring at the old battered Cadillac convertible alongside his patrol car pickup.

“Jack, please!” Cat moaned, shoving him along and Crow looked down at him and saw the tears in his eyes and realized that it was fear for his own safety that so terrified his friend.

So he hurried, because he couldn’t stand to see Cherry Cat crying.

Crow opened the side door to the pickup Cat shoved him at and climbed in beside the sheriff that somehow Cat had collected from the driver’s side. And then Cat was inside too behind the wheel and Omigod! The keys! Where are the… but they were there, the sheriff had just left ’em there in the ignition, why not? Who would steal it?

And Crow found himself laughing at this as they screeched out of the parking lot onto the highway. Because it was better, it was fun, to have something to laugh at besides crying at the continuing thumps of horror from inside the motel or allow himself to actually focus on the slaughtered occupants of the convertible, the whores who had been too late, but not late enough and — “CROWWW!” sounded out in the darkness, piercing through the roar of the engine and the distance and twisting each man in the cab of the truck into a little ball. “CROWWW!” shouted the vampire, as Cat gunned the engine even harder and the truck vaulted forward to sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour down the two-lane state highway.

“CROWWW!” blasted them as the vampire caught them and leapt onto the back of the truck bed and slammed his hands through the rear window and Crow found that he had the sheriff’s huge cannon pistol in his hand and he jabbed it in the monster’s face and — why not? — pulled the trigger.

The fiend, all shiny blood-red teeth of his ghastly smile and soul-ripping gleam of intelligence, disappeared backward rolling from the concussion of the cannon-pistol, cracking through the tailgate and slamming it open like it wasn’t there and then skidding all asprawl on the sandpaper asphalt.

“Oh! Yes, yes! Ha! Hey!” the sheriff whined delightedly at the sight, the thought that the monster could be killed. But even knowing better, the other two in the cab still crumpled a little more as the sheriff’s cry of gasping pleasure changed to a shrill baby-boy whimper at the sight of the monster back on his feet almost immediately, almost before he had stopped kicking, and coming back at them again.

It got close enough for them to see the hole from the cannon pistol already closing up, trapping the trickling black blood left from the priest’s stabbing cross and — “Jesus Christ!” screamed Crow as they topped over a hill at over a hundred miles an hour up behind a farm truck doing maybe twenty in the center of the highway.

Cat wrenched the truck to the left and missed the farmer but got onto the shoulder and got sideways and careened back across the center line starting to spin around and around and topping up over another hill so they could see the city square in the distance and Crow thought, Well, at least we almost made it into town. And he mourned the unattainable sight of redemption of that little town square with the morning sun just starting to peek out over…

The sun! The fucking sun! was his last thought before the truck began to tumble, rolling over and over on its sides and then end over end and then sliding forever and ever down the main Street of the little Indiana town.

He awoke first and got himself up. And then he got the other two up. And then he got the three of them through the gathering crowd down the three blocks toward the hospital before the ambulance met them halfway. He got them inside and got their blood types, and when they were all set and going to make it, he lay down and collapsed, his last thought:

I thought sure it was the leader.

First Interlude

The Man sat calmly, in regal white, waiting for his aide to compose himself. When at last he seemed in control, the Man smiled and nodded.

“Holiness,” began the aide, his voice rich with frustration and almost childlike pique, “this man Crow is a catastrophe.”

“Tell us,” said the Man.

“Holiness, the man arrived drunk. He was loud. He was obnoxious and profane. He insulted everyone in sight. He referred to the priests as eunuchs. He called the sisters penguins. He attempted to engage one of the guards in a fistfight on the steps outside the private entrance.”

“Was there a fight?”

“No, Holiness. I intervened.” The aide sighed. “Forgive me, Holiness, but I almost wish I had not. It would have done that buffoon good to have been thrashed by the Swiss…”

“Our orders were very clear, we hope?”

“Yes, Holiness. And it was for this reason that I intervened. I received scant appreciation for my concern. Mr. Crow called me… me…”

“Called you what?”

“Nutless.”

The Man sighed. “It is very difficult for you, my old friend. We are sorry.”

“Oh, please, Holiness. I am not complaining. I only…” The aide stopped and smiled with some embarrassment. “I suppose I am complaining at that. Forgive me, Holiness.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“Thank you, Holiness.”

“We hear the man is injured.”

“Yes, Holiness. His entire right shoulder is wrapped in bandages. But he will not let any of our doctors examine him.” The aide paused, looked at the window at the far end of the ancient room. “He claims he is fine, Holiness. But he lies. I believe him to be in great pain when he moves.”

“He is indeed, my friend,” said the Man softly. “Even when he does not.” The Man smiled sadly. “Great pain.”

The aide was silent for several moments. Then: “Holiness, I know this Mr. Crow is of great importance to… But it would help greatly if — Holiness, can we not know who he is?”

“You cannot.”

“But Holiness, if we could just…”

“You cannot.”

The aide sighed once more. “Yes, Holiness.” He took a slow deep breath, seemed to rid himself of the concern, said, “All is in readiness. The dining room is prepared. American food, as your Holiness ordered, will be served.”

“Thank you. You have been very thorough.”

“Thank you, Holiness. The man Crow is already in the dining room, has been for” — he checked his watch — “almost fifteen minutes. He is already intoxicated, Holiness. Perhaps there would be a better time.”

“There will be no better time,” replied the Man in a voice of such infinite sadness and despair that the aide found he could not speak for a bit.

He made ready to go, kissing the ring. But at the door the aide paused. The Man could see how clearly the other felt driven to utter this last.

“Holiness, be very careful with Mr. Crow. He has much anger in his soul. And… I believe he hates you.”

The Man waited until he was alone before rising. Then he padded softly across the room to the side entrance. He paused before opening the door to his private dining room.

“So he does,” the Man muttered softly to himself. “And why should he not?”

Then he opened the door and went in.

Tapestries. A broad arched ceiling. A carpet over three hundred years old. A long, thin table with a single heavy wooden chair at each end. In the far one sat Jack Crow, one leg over an arm, a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

The Man nodded to the bows of the four servants — two on each wall and recessed like the paneling — and stepped easily to the center of the room. He waited.

“Well, there he is at last,” barked Crow. He stood ponderously, still carrying his glass and cigarette, and walked over.

The Man waited until the other had come within a few feet. “It is good to see you again, Jack,” he said easily. Then he offered his ring.

Crow stared at the ring with apparent bewilderment. Then he smiled. He put his cigarette in his mouth, transferred the wineglass from his right hand to his left, shook the hand holding the ring, and said, through cigarette smoke, “How the heck are you?”

Despite repeated and insistent orders, it was all the servants could do to restrain themselves.

The Man did not stir. He met Crow’s piercing gaze without rancor. He smiled. “We are quite well, Jack. But I see you are injured.” He indicated the bulky bandaging underneath Crow’s corduroy jacket.

Crow felt his arm absently. “Oh, it ain’t much, priest, considering. Everybody else is dead. Except for Cat and me. Everybody else, though. The Team is dead. All of ’em.”

“Yes, Jack. We know.”

The two locked eyes for several seconds. Then Crow turned abruptly away, flicking an ash onto the carpet and reaching for the decanter of wine. “All dead. Everyone of ’em slaughtered.” He poured some more wine into his glass. Then he plopped back down into his chair and spoke with a voice blood-rich with bitterness. “So, tell me about your week.”

Crow became increasingly more profane, more insulting. He referred to the man as “Your Assholiness.” He put his cigarettes out on whatever was nearby, the plate, the glass, the tabletop. He was loud. He was vicious. He was disgusting.

The Man said little, his mournful sadness filling his end of the small chamber. He was becoming more and more concerned about the servants, who seemed frozen into a comalike state certain to erupt in violence.

“All of you,” whispered the Man, his gaze taking in the four servants on both sides of the room. “Leave us now.”

It took them several moments to react. But they did, moving stone-faced and dry-hinged to the exits. Luigi stopped briefly before the door and looked back.

The Man smiled reassuringly. “We will call you if we need you.”

Luigi still stared.

“It will be all right, my friend,” added the Man gently.

And then they were alone.

“Now that’s more like it,” cackled Crow. “Now we can get down to the serious drinkin’.”

He reached over to grab a chair from the wall and slide it over next to the Man. But he had trouble, first with his balance, then with the weight of the massive chair on his right arm. It seemed to bring out something even darker than the bitterness and fury. Something deeper. Something worse.

He finally got the chair alongside the Man and banged down into it. Then he realized he was almost out of wine. He stared forlornly into the near-empty decanter in his lap.

The Man, still calm, still cool, said, “We have some, Jack,” and reached for the carafe by his plate.

“Fuck, no!” roared Crow suddenly, inexplicably. He half-rose to his feet. He shot out one hand to intercept the wine and with the other, his right one, his injured one, slammed the pontiff back into his chair.

Dead silence. Each man stared, wide-eyed in shock at what had just happened. Crow dropped the decanter onto the table. It shattered. Red wine began to flow around the plate and toward the edge of the table.

Crow tried. He really tried. He lurched crazily forward to stem the flow. He cracked his forearm down on the edge to dam it up. But nothing could stop the scarlet stream from spattering across the Man’s milk-white, snow-pure robes.

And for a moment each simply stared, not at each other but at this.

And then Crow exploded. He leapt to his feet and roared and screeched, splashing the wine from the table onto the robes over and over again, roaring and roaring louder and louder as he sprayed it, yelling at the top of his lungs: “Take it, goddammit! Take it, you papist motherfucker! It’s about time you got some of the goddamned blood!” and the Man just sat there, frozen in his chair, his eyes closed to the spattering drops covering his robes, his head, his face, and above him Crow still raged and roared and then.

Then was utterly silent.

The Man opened his eyes to the vision of the giant trembling above him, his hands and face and clothes covered with wine and fury and…

And agony.

“My son,” be whispered and his compassion was a thing alive. “Oh, my son.”

Jack Crow’s face, rock-taut with ferocity, cracked in two. Then it began to melt. Tears welled up in his eyes and began to rush down his cheeks. His cry of pain was irretrievable and lost.

Then he was falling to his knees and sobbing, his massive arms snaking out to wrap around the other man’s waist as a child’s for safety and comfort and the old man held him and rocked him as the great shoulders shook with the great sobs that simply would not stop but went on and on and on.

“Oh, Father! It was so horrible!” whimpered the giant “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” he cried later and both men knew it was for nothing that had happened there this night. And later, when the giant was almost asleep and his voice was a dry cracking hiss pleading, “God, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me…” over and over the old man forgave him again and again and again.

And later, hours later, when they could not get their master to rise rather than disturb the sleeping giant curled into his lap, they thought it was his infinite compassion, his infinite love that kept him praying all this night for the soul of this great weeping beast.

But it was fear.

For the Man was certain that Jack Crow would be forgiven for his sins.

But who would forgive him for sending this poor soul out still again to face the monsters once more?

Chapter 4

Jack Crow awoke with a start from some nameless horrible on the flight from Rome and beheld the angelic face of his newest team member, Father Adam, sleeping across from him.

He’s a sweet kid, thought Jack. I’ll probably get him killed, too.

Then he went back to sleep because any other thoughts were better than these.

“I need a vampire,” said Carl Joplin for the hundredth time. Cat burped and ignored him. Annabelle placed a soft white hand on Carl’s great fat shoulder and said, “I know, dear.”

The rest of Team Crow had been at the bar at the Monterey Airport for four hours. One hour to get primed for the homecoming and the three more the plane turned out to be late. It was not a pretty sight.

Except, thought Cat, for Annabelle. She was always a pretty sight. Even when she wasn’t. He propped his elbow very carefully against the edge of the bar, made a fist with his hand, put his cheek on it, and examined her.

He had known her his whole life and… Waitaminute. That wasn’t true. He had known her six years. No. Seven years. Almost seven years, since before her late husband, Basil O’Bannon, had founded Vampire$ Inc. And anyway, she was still the same. Still pretty and still plump and still mostly blond and still forty-something or sixty-something years old — it didn’t seem to apply — and still able to outdrink God.

Time to take a piss, he decided. He lifted himself off the barstool, careful not to get the toe of his boot caught on the railing like last time, and ambled off on his mission.

Carl Joplin looked up from rubbing his wondrous belly and said, “I need a vampire.”

“I know, dear,” said Annabelle.

“It’s gotta be tested!” he insisted.

“I know, dear. We’ll ask Jack when the plane gets in.” Carl snarled and sipped his drink. “Jack! Shit!” He was still mad at Jack and likely to stay that way. “Jack!” he repeated disgustedly.

Carl Joplin was the weapons man and the tool man for the team. He made the crossbows for Jack and Cat’s wooden knives and everything else they took with them into battle, but did he ever get to go into battle? Hell, no! “Too valuable,” Jack would always say. Somebody had to be free and clear of the fight at all times to make sure the fight could go on. Carl could buy that. It made sense. But how come it had to be him every goddamn time?

But it was. Sure, he was a little overweight and maybe pushing sixty but that was no reason not to let him duke it out just once. Just one time, baby!

The detector was his best chance. Joplin had actually come up with a vampire detector based on the presumed electromagnetic energy of any object and/or critter able to totally absorb all sunlight. It was an ingenious gadget but it required a vampire to test it. Carl knew damn well they could never hope — or, for that matter, be so stupid as to try — to capture a fiend and bring it to him. Ergo, he would have to be there on sight to run the buttons and knobs the rest of the peckerwoods were too damned ignorant to follow in the first place. He’d get into it one way or the other, by God!

And in the meantime he went back to rubbing his great belly and snarling and refusing to see Annabelle’s smile when he did it. Which reminded him: how come he was sloppy drunk and she wasn’t? How come she never was? Huh? Explain me that!

Cat, weaving his way back through the tables from the rest room, was wondering the very same thing. He had never in all of his whole entire life seen Annabelle drunk. And she drank as much as anybody, didn’t she? Well, didn’t she?

Did she? He thought back. Yup. She did. In fact, she was the one who had really gotten the serious stuff going with that schnapps shit. Waitaminute! Schnapps! She always drank schnapps! Maybe if I drank schna… Waitaminuteagain! I am drinking schnapps. I’ve been drinking it. That’s how I got so polluted.

He plopped back down on his stool thinking: Mystery of the Universe!

“I need a vampire,” said Carl once again at Cat’s reappearance.

“In a minute,” Cat finally retorted.

And they hissed at each other.

Annabelle smiled again. But not too much or she was certain she’d lose her balance, keel backward off the stool, skirts flying, and crack her head on the side of the bar like a ripe grapefruit.

And then, she giggled silently to herself, little purple butterflies would sparkle out.

She had never been so thoroughly plastered in her life. She doubted if anyone had. And the thought of actually being able to sit down and pee was her notion of heaven. But do women pee? Sure they do. No. They dew. Horses sweat, men perspire, and women dew. Right? No, that was something else.

But urinate sounded so dreadful. So unladylike.

And if she didn’t risk weaving to the rest room in front of the men she was about to do something a lot more unladylike. Being a lady — setting the standard — was paramount. She bore the entire responsibility, she was quite certain, for Team Crow.

In a very real sense, more than she would ever fully comprehend, this was quite true. Annabelle O’Bannon was more than a simple regal beauty who kept her raucous men in line. She was their symbol for the rest of the world they were surely going to die trying to protect. She was why they kept going out to fight knowing damn well they would eventually lose. It had happened to everyone else. It would happen to them. But this way it wouldn’t happen to Annabelle.

They didn’t know this, her men. That is, they had never consciously voiced it, even inside their own heads. But it was so. It was so because she, Annabelle, was so. Just so.

She had that way with men only certain ladies and other magical creatures possessed. A way of making them sit down and eat their porridge or drink their drink. Of making them shut up and listen to someone else talk.

She could make them wear ties.

She also possessed the unique ability to actually stop violence, like the time she made Jack put that Harley down — and not on that poor moaning biker like he wanted.

None of this was getting her off the barstool and into the ladies’ room. And she simply had to go. Then a thought occurred.

“Young man,” she called to the middle-aged bartender, “I’ll have another.” Then she slid off the stool and landed, thank God, on both high-heeled feet and had weaved her way several steps toward sweet release before Carl and Cat could get over the shock.

The two men looked at one another. Another drink? Another-goddamned-drink? She was going to have another round and here they were, the two of them big tough guy Fighters of Evil trying desperately to focus on their cocktail napkins for balance, for chrissakes, and she’s having another…

But what could they do? What choice did they have? It was awful and grisly to do it but the alternative was worse, giving in was worse.

Carl gulped, said, “Me too.”

The bartender, bright, sober, and sadistic, asked Cat, “Another all the way around?”

And Cat, his face gray and his life passing before his eyes, nodded dully.

Annabelle’s timing was, as always, exquisite. She had made it almost out of sight while the men were occupied with machismo. She paused at the entrance to the bar and, with apparent unconcern, spoke back over her shoulder, “Young man,” she called sweetly to the bartender, “I guess not after all.”

All three men turned toward her, the bartender with hands full of fixings. “You don’t want another, lady?”

Annabelle smiled. “I guess not.”

The bartender’s annoyance barely showed. “You’re sure?” he pursued.

She paused, seemed to take the question of chemical suicide seriously, then shook her pretty head again. “I guess not,” she repeated and then she was gone.

Her men all but leapt at the opening she had provided.

“I guess not, too.”

“Me either, now that I think about it.” Both burst out in the rapid staccato of machine-gun fire.

The bartender stared at them, glanced at the rest of the lounge, which was completely empty, and sighed. Too good to be true, he thought. He’d known that just three people making his overhead for the day was too good to be true. But still, they’d almost made it.

Annabelle neither heard nor cared about any of this. She was too busy stamping her awkward path to the ladies room door, bashing it open with both hands and part of her hairdo, jerking herself awkwardly into a stall, unsheathing herself, and then reveling in one of those mini-orgasms reserved for those lucky creatures made in God’s image.

Later she thought: I’m so tired.

It had been a busy two weeks for her. With Jack in Rome it was left to Cat and Carl and herself (meaning her) to handle all the arrangements. Contacting the next of kin had been easier than it might have been. Crusader types, she had long ago discovered, had a tendency to be loners.

Except for Anthony. She had gone to San Antonio to tell Mrs. Beverley in person. When that sainted woman had opened the door and seen her she had known. The two of them had held each other and rocked and cried and rocked and cried for two straight hours, their minds filled with the rich memories of the sweet, handsome, brave huge black Anthony they had loved so, much. No loss, except of her husband Basil, had ever touched her so much. And she had known right then that when Jack’s and Cat’s time came — as it certainly would — that would be all for her.

She knew it was up to her to keep going. She knew that Carl Joplin, as amazingly competent as he truly was, would need her desperately. Would fail, probably, without her help.

She knew this and she didn’t care. When Jack and Cat went, that would be it. Even the hinted image of that loss, so wickedly brutal, so thoroughly devastating, was intertwined with one of herself sitting quietly in her room lining up the pills to swallow. Interesting enough, it bad never occurred to her that she might die another way. Vampires? She had never seen one, never wished to, and could think of no reason in the world why she ever should. That was the men’s job. They were hers.

Later, of course, when the horror was roaring in on them, it would be different. But she couldn’t have known that now.

Her thoughts turned to the move. They were leaving Pebble Beach and moving back home to Texas. To Dallas. They were going to miss their mansion with its view of the bay and the sculptured golf courses and the ocean fog rolling across the tops of the pine trees and, most of all, the miniature deer eating her flowers every morning.

She had claimed, loudly and often, that she hated the creatures and believed them to be a scourge of nature. The world, she insisted, would be better off if every single deer was burned at the stake.

“Bambi, too?” someone would invariably ask.

“Especially Bambi,” she would sharply retort. “That vile little mutt has only encouraged them.”

This fooled absolutely no one, of course. But still every morning she would put, on her sneakers and her one pair of blue jeans and her late husband’s lumberjack shirt, tie her hair back in a scarf, grab her weapon (the back porch broom), and rush out to do battle. Everyone would race to the windows, even braving some truly monumental hangovers, to laugh and applaud and tap on the glass and just generally egg on the deer. Especially that one awful creature who was certain was the leader. So smug and cocky and sure self, it would actually stop eating and stand there, just stand there and stare at her as she ran at it waving the broom, showing not one ounce of fear until just before she could whack it, and then vault effortlessly over the ten-foot fence she had had especially constructed. The boys loved him and named him Bambi after that silly movie and — And.

And the boys…

The boys were all gone. The boys, her boys were all dead, all destroyed horribly and forever and…

And for a long time the only sound in the room came from the muffled sobs filling the tiny stall.

It was why they were moving. The Zoo, the nickname for the wing now holding seven unoccupied bedrooms, was empty. Empty and hollow and dark and sad. It had been the only post massacre order Jack had been able to manage. Near-incoherent with pain and rage and shame, his last comment before boarding the plane to Europe was to take everything home to Texas where they belonged.

Annabelle had thus been left with the project of packing everything up, flying to Dallas, selecting and buying another house (with room for Carl’s workshop), and most difficult of all, sorting out the boys’ belongings.

So many belongings. And such, such… boyish things. She smiled at that thought and wiped away another tear.

Because they were such boys. They were grown men, too. All of them. The youngest almost twenty-five, the oldest just over forty, older even than Cat, the second in command.

But they were such boys, too. Oh, she knew why. She did. She understood why. It was their job, the nature of it, the fear of it, the…

The certainty of it.

They weren’t going to get married and raise children and grow old and pass away retired in some resort community. They were going to die. They were going to be killed by some desperate lunge of talon or teeth, too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it. And then they were going to have to be staked and beheaded by the survivors who couldn’t even use the funeral as a time to mourn because of it.

They were going to die. And soon. And they knew it. Every single one of them knew it. They were going to die.

And so they were kids. Her boys. She packed up so many toys. Video games and stereo sets and model airplanes and pinball games (everybody had to have his own machine) and hookah pipes and science fiction books and comic books, some of which were, inexplicably to Annabelle, in Japanese. (She could never understand that. None of the boys spoke Japanese, much less read it.) And then there were the stacks of porno books and magazines and she found it was apparently legal to actually entitle a magazine Fuck Me.

So much stuff and plenty of money for it — the Man saw to that knowing they would never live to accumulate their own fortunes. And they spent it.

But what was appalling and, she admitted it, endearing to Annabelle was what they did with it all. All that healthy maleness and alcohol and fear pent up in even so large a place as the mansion made for an extremely vibrant household to say the least.

The alcohol. So much alcohol. Team Crow got dead drunk the way normal people had a single cocktail. The monthly bill for liquor consumed on the premises was over a thousand dollars. And that didn’t even count the bar tabs Annabelle was forever driving around to pay off. The huge garage area was filled with Corvettes and four-wheel drives and motorcycles everyone was too drunk to drive home. After eight DWIs in two weeks, Jack had installed a taxi-home policy for everyone not going out with Cat (who drunk, could talk any cop out of his gun).

But it wasn’t just the booze. They were none of them alcoholics. It was just all that overgrown energy. They terrorized the maid service, inevitably springing themselves on the poor women stark naked and dripping from the shower and offering to help. It was so hard to keep cooks they were finally forbidden to even enter the kitchen while the cook was on the property. If they wanted something they had to phone in and ask for it. The amount of food pleased and frightened the cooks at the same time. They were able to consume astonishing amounts of food. Any kind of food. Junk food. Gourmet buffets. Munchies. Anything. Everything.

They never got fat. None of them — except for Carl, of course — even got beer bellies. Every morning they would get up and work out rigorously, the sweat running salty past their grins. It was not that they were especially disciplined. They most certainly were not. They were… committed. They were faithful. And they were alone together. It wasn’t just each one of them who worried about himself. If one couldn’t spin his body around quick enough with that brutish wooden stake in his grip, then it might not be just him slashed from throat to thighs. It might be one of his mates. No. It would be one of his mates. Because there was, quite literally, no one else in the world to save them but them.

It was why, recalled Annabelle, Jack had forbidden wrestling matches. Which were always happening in the stairwells, for some reason. She supposed it was because those broad shoulders were always clipping past one another in a hurry and then one thing led to another and…

Jack wouldn’t have it. They were already wrapped far too tightly to be adrenaline-bruising their only kin.

So instead they tore up the house. That time they decided to play indoor golf because of the rain.

She busied herself in front of the lounge mirror, thinking back and trying without success to keep the smile from her face. To be fair, Jack had not even been in town. He and Cat had gone up to San Francisco with Anthony to watch his old team beat the 49’ers. But that didn’t mean she believed for one single instant Jack would have stopped them. Probably would have just sat there in that big chair of his and laughed and bet on the winner.

Indoor golf. She sighed. They had broken six windows. Three of them cut glass.

She paused and inspected her appearance before returning to the bar. She supposed she looked fine.

For what she was.

For what was left. For what there was to look forward to. I’m so tired, she thought again. And then she thought: No. That’s a lie: I’m frightened. And then she thought: No. I’m both. Both.

Jack! Hurry back. Hurry back to us and still be you!

Father Adam looked to his left, at the seventy-ish man sleeping across the aisle from him and said in his silent TV commentator’s voice, There are, for your information, sir, over six hundred exorcisms officially performed in America each year. And to you, it’s just something that made a great movie that may or may not have been true once but isn’t now.

Adam’s gaze slid across the aisle to Jack, dozing in front of him.

And this man, he continued, kills vampires for a living. How about that?

Adam sighed, resting his eyes on Crow a bit longer before turning and viewing the mountains of the western United States sweeping below.

I’m in a dream. But maybe not. This is real and this has been happening, bile flowing from the Beast, since the dawn of man and before. This isn’t a dream.

He turned again to look at Jack Crow.

It’s simply that this man is a movie. A walking, talking, bleeding, cussing, bigger-than-life bear of a man. He’s a movie, just being alive.

But movies aren’t real, are they? he asked himself.

Neither is the priesthood. Isn’t that why you’re here?

He started to ignore himself. But then he decided he no longer had to. He was here now and into it. He was no longer some lanky, dark-curled kid too pretty for his own good hiding out from girls in seminary and from the meat-eaters’ man’s world in his black-and-white king’s X uniform.

He looked again around the cabin. It wasn’t the real world of this plane, perhaps. Of men striving to earn first-class seats or pilot’s stripes. It wasn’t the real world of men at all.

But it was the real world of man.

Of man and God.

And he, Adam the schoolyard trembler, had grown up and come here to fight for them both. At last.

To the last.

He slept.

I don’t know who else to get, thought Jack Crow. And I’m tired of getting them. We need the best kind of person around. No one less will do.

But they will die. And that means I have to find the best men I know and condemn them to a certain violent end just because they’re the best.

Shit.

And they always said yes. That was the worst part of it. The good ones, once they knew it was being done, had to be doing it.

So they did it and they died.

Doubleshit.

Oh, God! Please don’t call us now! There’s only four of us left and this kid-priest and one of ’em’s a middle-aged woman and another is pushing sixty and fat and damn well not scared enough for me and another is the finest man I’ve ever known.

And, tripleshit, the last one is me.

Please, phone, don’t ring!

The plane landed and Jack Crow shook himself hard and reminded himself that he was supposed to be a leader of some kind so: Rock and roll, goddammit! Off your butt and off this plane and here we go again! Come on!

Don’t think about the phone.

They knew the priest was coming but they didn’t know anything about him. Jack strode through the gate to Annabelle with Adam close behind. He leaned down and kissed her and said, “Folks, this is Adam.”

“Father Adam,” Adam amended firmly. Team Crow exchanged rolled eyes.

“I’m her Royal Highness Annabelle.”

“Lord High-Muck-a-muck Carl Joplin.”

Adam blinked, stared at them. Cat, grinning, stepped forward and shook his hand.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said Cat. “I am the Great and Powerful Oz.”

And then they were all walking rapidly toward baggage claim without further explanation. Adam found himself offered Annabelle’s arm. He took it and shut up and walked.

“I need a vampire,” began Carl.

Jack barely glanced at him. “Is it working?”

“It was working last night.”

Jack stopped. They all stopped and stared at Carl.

“Well, to tell the truth, I don’t know what made it beep then.” They resumed walking. “But it should work,” Carl persisted. “And it’s gotta be tested.”

“How does it work?” Jack wanted to know.

“You wouldn’t understand it, Jack, and you know it.”

“Hmm. Possibly. Then how are we supposed to test it?”

"We ain’t. I am.”

Jack sighed, shook his head. “Oh, great. Here we go again with your—”

“Goddammit, Jack! There ain’t anybody else!”

“How do you figure that?”

They had reached the baggage claim area. They stopped. Carl took a deep breath and hitched up his pants. He began counting off fingers.

“Well, Annabelle can’t do it ’cause she watches the soaps during the day. You’re supposed to be guarding my ass while I’m doing it. Cat…”

“I could do it,” Cat offered with a sly grin.

Carl gave him a dirty look. “What do you know about the electromagnetic spectrum?”

“I’m for it.”

“What do you know about EEGs? Brain waves?” Cat frowned. “Is this a surfing question?”

Carl snarled. “As I was saying: Annabelle is out, you and Cat have your own little trick to do. That leaves me.” He paused, stepped up to Jack. His face was dead serious. “Look, Jack. You’ll be able to operate it after I get it right. But I must be there to twitch it until it’s on.”

Jack stared at him but did not speak.

Carl grimaced. “I’m telling you straight.”

But Jack had never doubted that. All he could think of was: Here I go again. I’m going to have to risk you, too. Dammit, am I going to lose everyone?

He stepped closer to Annabelle and hugged her without realizing why.

“I’ll think about it” was all he said, but it was already done and everyone but Adam knew it.

There was an awkward pause while they stood about. No bags appeared from the chute, though they heard the usual destructive noises from somewhere beneath them.

Cat’s voice sparkled into the silence. He slapped Adam on the shoulder. “Don’t know about you guys, but it’s great to have a father, huh, folks?”

Adam smiled uncertainly in reply. Annabelle grinned widely.

“Now,” continued Cat. “If we only had a mother…”

Annabelle looked offended. “What’s wrong with me? Besides being far too young?”

“Well,” he replied, rubbing his jaw and eyeing her immaculately tasteful dove-gray pants suit, “now that we’ve got a priest and all for a father… For a mother we need someone a little less… slutty.”

Adam stared wide-eyed. But Annabelle only nodded soberly.

“I suppose you’re right,” she replied thoughtfully.

Only then did Adam notice the grins around him.

But Cat was still talking. “…nominate Davette for the job,” he said with a gentle leer.

“Who’s that?” Jack asked.

Carl growled, “Investigative journalism come to save the world from the scam of Vampires$ Inc. What else?”

“Or…” retorted Cat with a finger in the air. “Come to tell the world of our plight so we can get a little decent cooperation for a change. And I think that’s it. She likes us, Carl.”

“They all like us. So what.”

“You mean a reporter?” Adam asked.

“That’s what they mean,” Annabelle told them.

“You didn’t talk to them, did you?” cried the priest.

“All day yesterday,” Annabelle replied sweetly. “And some of last night. Interviewed everybody but Jack.” She paused. “And now you, dear.”

Adam looked flabbergasted. Frozen.

Again Team Crow exchanged rolled eyes.

Adam finally spoke. “You didn’t tell them anything…? Did you?”

Cat smiled. “Not much really. Just what we do for a living, how we do it, who we’ve done it for, their names and how to get in touch with them to confirm it… that sort of thing.”

Adam looked even worse than before. He looked like he was about to explode. Finally, he did:

"How could you be so indiscreet? How could you… To actually tell her! What got into you? What possessed you to do such a thing?”

Cat regarded him calmly. “Well, I’ll tell you, padre. It’s what I always do with the press. Of course, she’s gonna be back at the house this afternoon to talk to Jack. And then you can tell her I was only fooling.”

The luggage carousel grumbled, began to turn, spouted out a single suitcase. It was Adam’s. He stared at it for a moment, then grabbed it up with a single jerk and began stalking away.

“Where are you going?” Carl wanted to know.

“To take off his collar,” replied Jack dryly.

Adam stopped, looked at Jack with surprise, then anger. “That’s right!” he snapped and continued on to the men’s room.

Cat lit a cigarette. “It’s just a guess, of course. But offhand, I’d say the Church policy on publicity hasn’t changed much.”

Everybody laughed.

Jack lit his own cigarette and spoke: “Oh, he’s not so bad. Poor kid’s had that stuff drilled into him by the Man. Afraid we’ll start some sort of panic and that’ll start a witch hunt and on and on…”

“And on and on and on,” Carl finished for him. “Stupid fools. This deal could use a little panic. The vampires are there, goddammit!”

Jack looked at him. “Are you trying to convince me?”

Carl grinned about halfway. “Well… yeah. But that kid’s a stupid punk if he thinks we’re gonna do anything Rome says.”

The rest of the bags began to appear. Cat stepped forward to get Jack’s.

“Maybe so,” said Cat. “But unless that bag of his was empty, he’s strong as an ox. See the way he grabbed it up?”

Jack smiled. “Oh, he’s fit all right. I suspect he’s actually been working out. Training to join the Vampire Quest.”

Annabelle beamed. “I like him.”

Jack smiled at her. “I do, too.”

Carl frowned. “He still made an ass of himself.”

Cat smiled brightly. “So who’d notice that around here?”

Carl snarled at him.

“So what about this reporter?” Jack asked. “Any good?”

“Well, she’s gorgeous,” offered Cat.

“She’s young,” added Annabelle. “Couldn’t be over twenty-two.”

“Who does she work for?” asked Jack.

“Nobody,” said Carl.

“Oh, Carl,” sighed Annabelle. “She’s freelance. She thinks she can sell us to Texas Monthly.”

“What’s she doing in California?”

Cat shrugged. “She came to see us. Heard about us back home. She knows Jim Atkinson on the magazine.”

“Does she know he couldn’t get his story about us printed?”

Cat smiled. “I told her. I don’t think she believed me.”

Jack sighed. “Oh, great.”

“Did I mention she’s beautiful?” asked Cat.

Jack looked at him seriously. “Gorgeous, I believe you said.”

“Oh, she’s that, too. And weird-looking.”

Annabelle frowned. “Cherry Cat, how could you say that?” She turned to Jack. “She’s a very nice-looking girl. Very polite. Very hard-working. I like her.”

“You like everybody,” growled Carl.

“I don’t like you,” she pointed out.

“That’s true.”

“What do you mean, weird-looking?” asked Jack.

Cat took a puff and thought a moment. “I don’t know. Strange. I mean, she doesn’t have a mohawk or anything. She just… Well, sometimes she looks like a princess, you know, all regal and pure.”

“And other times?”

“Other times she makes me think of a gang-bang victim waiting for the motorcycles to start.”

The men laughed. Annabelle said, “Oh, Cherry!” and gave him a playful slap on the shoulder.

Cat was feigning grievous injury when Father Adam returned wearing civvies and a grim look.

“Are we ready?” he asked.

“We are,” replied Jack with equal seriousness.

They found their way outside and climbed into the truck. Cat insisted Jack drive, saying he was so drunk Jack looked handsome to him. Jack drove without replying. On the way he tried talking to the still stiff young priest.

“Father Adam,” he began.

“Aha!” chirped Cat from the back seat. “Tact!”

“Shaddup, Cat!”

“Yes, bwana.”

Jack tried again. He was fairly gentle, the others thought, for him. He explained that the priest needn’t worry too much about this — or, for that matter, any other — reporter. Jack told him about all the reporters they had met and been interviewed by in the past. About all the stories that had been written. About all the editors who had killed the stories. Or their careers trying to push the stories on through.

Because nobody believed in vampires.

Or wanted to believe in vampires.

Or wanted to admit they believed.

Or wanted it known that they believed.

Or anything else.

Jack told him some more about it in their brief drive through Carmel and into the Del Monte Forest. He told about the big stack of apologetic letters from a long string of publications. Told about the one story they did get printed, for the “Inquiring Minds” people. About how that story, despite all the fuss and silliness it caused, actually led to their getting a legitimate call from a sheriff in Tennessee.

Jack ended with: “So I wouldn’t worry too much about this girl — what’s her name? Yvette?”

“Davette,” corrected Annabelle.

“Whatever. I wouldn’t worry about her. Her tale won’t get printed either. Even if it slams us. They don’t even publish those for some reason. But…” And he pulled up at a stop sign and turned in his seat and faced the younger man. “But I wish they would. This ain’t Rome, kid. This is the battleground. And if I could get on Good Morning, America tomorrow morning, I would. One of the biggest troubles we got is belief. Most people don’t or won’t believe until it’s too late. But if they knew about somebody to call without going through all the rigmarole of the feds or the Church or whatever — Well, most times their local priests don’t even buy their fears. But if they knew about somebody who did — and just one or two goddamned days quicker — we could save lots of lives. You get it?”

Adam coughed, cleared his throat. “Yes, well, it’s just that…”

Jack’s voice was iron. “Nope. Yes or no, son. There is no third way. Are you here with us or someone else? Yes or no.”

The young priest stared out the front window of the truck for a few moments. Then he glanced at Annabelle, who smiled at him warmly. Finally he looked at Jack.

“Yes, sir.”

Behind them another car at the stop sign honked for them to move. They did.

A few minutes later Jack pulled off the famous 17-Mile-Drive and onto a side road that climbed and curved up the side of a bill overlooking the Pebble Beach Golf Course and beyond, the glittering blue of Cannel Bay. Down below had been mostly cottages, but up here astride the ridge were the great estates, walled and spread-out and beautiful, with their towering pines and tennis courts and postcard courtyards and flower-eating deer. The home of Team Crow was one of the grandest atop the ridge, a huge multiwinged tudor mansion set back far from the road, with a five-car two-story garage, a Japanese garden in the rear surrounding a steamy heated pool, and eight acres left to play in.

A true palace, thought Jack as he negotiated around a parked car and started up the drive. And incredibly, it had felt too small.

But that was before.

Don’t think about the phone.

Cat and Annabelle were craning their heads to look behind them.

“Is that her?” she asked.

Cat nodded. “I think so. Looks like her car.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“It’s Davette,” Annabelle replied. “I think she fell asleep out front waiting for us to pick you up from that late plane of yours.”

“Want me to run down and get her?” Cat asked.

“No!” blurted Annabelle firmly.

Jack glanced at her, surprised, as he pulled the truck to a stop in the empty carport. “I thought you liked her.”

“I do. But we leave in six hours and I want to put you under first. After that you can talk to her.”

“Put you under.” Jack sat cringing behind the wheel as a wave of misery flushed through his system. Put me under, hypnotize me, make me remember back, remember everything that just happened — two weeks ago? Yesterday? Go back there and remember everything and make a tape of that same everything because any one detail might mean the difference later on. Nobody knew shit about vampires and they had to learn, had to, had to… Anthony! Oh, God! I don’t want to go back there again!

Adam spoke up from beside him. “Haven’t you made that last tape yet?”

And Jack’s memory scrambled desperately to help him.

“Sure I have,” he insisted, looking pale into their faces and feeling sweaty and lost. “Haven’t I?”

“No” was all Annabelle said in reply and it was gentle but it was also firm and that meant she loved him and understood even, but he was going to have to do it anyway.

Jack closed his eyes and let the wave pass.

He hadn’t thought back once. Not specifically, not in detail. Not once.

Not awake.

“How come you know about the tapes?” Carl asked Adam, and his voice sounded suspicious.

And that woke Jack up. Leader again. Depend on me. Rock and roll.

Jack turned in his seat and faced Carl. “This is the kid who keeps track of the tapes for the Man. Been doing it for three years.”

He noticed Cat was also leaning forward with interest, eyeing the man who, he had suddenly learned, knew all his secrets under fire and fear.

But all Cat said was “Oh,” and leaned back.

“Okay,” said Jack, yanking the door open. “Okay,” he said again, more quietly, to Annabelle.

And then they were all clambering out and reaching for bags and starting up the walkway to the front door.

“Six hours, huh?” Jack asked no one in particular. “You’ve moved everything already?”

Annabelle was cheery. “You actually could have flown straight to Dallas, if we could have gotten hold of you to tell you. Carl just has the one load left.”

“Weapons,” Carl offered, walking along beside him. “Crossbows and the like. Gonna have to truck ’em to Dallas tomorrow. Stupid F.A.A. feds! Scared to death a closed crate of medieval weapons is gonna take Pan Am to Cuba.” He laughed. They both paused on the front step. Jack thought he could already hear it ringing. He tried smiling along with Carl as the others gathered in a bottleneck before the door. Somebody was jingling keys.

“Funny thing,” Carl was saying. “If it was guns, something they’re already scared enough to know something about, they wouldn’t mind so much.” He paused, laughed again. “We oughta be using guns.”

Jack Crow, stepping numbly along with the others into the empty grand foyer, thought: Guns.

And then he thought: guns? Guns! Guns!

“Guns?” he all but shouted.

All turned toward him, surprised, alarmed, worried.

“What?” Carl asked him.

“Guns!”

“Guns?”

Jack hugged him and yelled: “Yes, goddammit! Guns! Hot Damn! Guns! Don’t you see?”

“Guns?”

“Rock and roll!”

Chapter 5

Surrounding the bar, surrounding the last of the booze, surrounded by Jack Crow’s obvious glee, they played his little guessing game.

Carl evinced irritation. Annabelle tried to look bored. Cat was amused. Adam was just as bewildered as he had been since Rome. But Jack—

Jack was having so goddamn much fun that nobody really cared.

He’s back, thought Cat to himself.

And when he spotted the misty affection in his comrades’ eyes, he knew they were feeling the same.

“Look,” Jack began again, propping his boot on the railing behind the bar with a thump that echoed in the now-empty room. “It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together.”

He stared at their blank faces. He somehow managed to smile while still grinning.

“All right, class. We shall begin again,” he said and they did.

And this time they began to see.

“…and the bullet hole from the sheriff’s gun — in his forehead, remember? It was already closing, right? And it was trapping the blood from Hernandez’s silver cross gash, right?”

No one spoke.

“Right?” repeated Jack.

“Right,” Cat responded slowly. “Well?”

“Well, what, goddammit?” growled Carl.

Cat suddenly sat forward. “The gash hadn’t healed…”

“From the cross…” continued Adam.

“From the holy silver cross,” Jack corrected.

“But the bullet wound was already closing!” Carl jumped in, seeing it all now. He stood up from his stool and slapped the flat of his hand loudly on the top of the bar.

Jack was grinning mischievously. “You see it, don’t you?”

Carl looked disgusted. “I see it, all right. I just don’t believe it.”

And then Cat saw it. He moaned. “I don’t believe it either,” he said. But now he, too, was starting to grin.

Annabelle looked lost. “If somebody doesn’t tell me what’s happening pretty soon…”

Cat leaned close to her against the bar. “A cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-yo fucking Silver!”

And everybody, save Annabelle, laughed. She looked downright angry. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Silver bullets,” said Father Adam. Then he paused and, with a nod toward Jack, amended, “Holy silver bullets, blessed by the Church.”

“But I thought silver bullets were for werewolves,” Annabelle asked.

“They are,” replied Adam calmly.

Too calmly, thought Jack. He held up a hand to cut off the questions all had turned to ask the young priest. “No!” he barked firmly. “No! I don’t even want to know, Adam.”

Adam smiled, eyed his glass.

“You hear me?” Jack insisted.

“I hear you.”

Jack turned to Carl. “Can you pour the bullets?”

Carl grinned smugly. He sat back down. “Sure, I can pour them. But can anybody here shoot except me?”

Jack frowned. “You’re not going, Joplin. You’re the base man. How many times do I have to—”

“This is different,” Carl insisted. “I’m a marksman. Somebody else could…”

Jack leaned his elbows on the bar and stared him into silence. His voice was gentle but absolutely final. “It’s not going to happen, my friend.”

Carl hated this. “Well, dammit!” he retorted. “Can you shoot?”

“Qualified whenever Uncle Sam asked.”

Carl snorted. “Qualified! Shit! Any fool don’t shoot himself in the foot can qualify!”

“Then good news, everyone,” popped Cat brightly. “I can probably qualify.”

Jack sighed, looked at him. “That bad?”

Cat smiled back. “Pretty bad. I can hit the broadside of a barn, but…”

“But what?”

“It would help some if I was inside the barn at the time.”

Jack put his face in his hands. “Oh, great.”

“Jack,” Carl began. “I…”

“Shut up, Carl. You’ll do no shooting.”

Carl laughed. “Like hell I won’t, big boy. I’ll have to just to teach you bums.” He turned to Adam. “Unless you’re a fast draw or something.”

Adam smiled thinly. “They didn’t teach that in seminary.”

Cat nodded. “It’s why I didn’t go.”

“Quiet, Cherry Cat,” snapped Jack. “Carl’s right. We need the training. Tell me, Crack Shot, how long till we get as good as you.”

Carl took a sip from his glass. “Forever.” He held up his hand before Jack could say anything. “I’m serious. Jack, this is a very different, very special tool. You’ve gotta have a knack for it. A certain touch. I was just thinking that it’s small enough that you could both carry it as a backup. That damn crossbow of yours is too unwieldy and too tough to load in a hurry, and Cat needs something besides those stakes and wooden knives he carries. Always has.”

He sat back, drained his glass. “But neither one of you is good enough to depend on your shooting. If you were that good, you’d already know it. I can teach you to be better than you are. But if you’re serious about this you’re gonna need something else.

“You’re gonna need a gunman.”

Annabelle spoke up. “You’ve already said you need at least two more men.”

Jack looked at her. “At least two.”

“Then one of ’em had better be a shooter,” added Carl.

“Or both,” said Adam.

“Or both,” Jack agreed.

Carl rattled the ice cubes in his empty glass. Jack took it and started to refill.

“The thing is,” Carl mused, almost to himself, “that the kind of man we need, the kind that fits in around here, well, he’s not likely to be good at this sort of thing.”

Annabelle frowned. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Well, no…” Carl admitted.

“You’re good at it.”

Carl nodded, took a sip from his new drink. “I am. An expert pistol shot. But the real gunmen I’ve known… and for our work it’s what we need… real gunmen. That’s just a different kind of a dude.”

Jack stood up suddenly. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He grinned and looked at the others. Then straight at Carl. “Carlos! Everything you say tonight reminds me of something. Silver bullets, and now…”

“A gunman?” Annabelle asked quietly.

Jack ignored the question. “Adam, call the Man and have some silver shipped to Dallas in a hurry. Annabelle, give him the address.”

“I can get us silver,” protested Carl. “Can’t the kid here bless it?”

“Kid.” Adam frowned. “It should at least be a bishop.”

“Okay,” said Jack. “Call the Man. Have him send an ingot or three… Hey! How about a shotgun? Anybody could with that! Or an M-16 or…”

Adam shook his head. “It must be a single bullet. It must be a small one. And it must have been part of a cross at one time.”

“How do you know this?” Carl wanted to know.

Jack did not. “Never mind. How small a bullet?”

“Any pistol will do.”

Jack looked at him. At his confident face. The kid knew his facts, it seemed.

“Okay,” he said. “Have ’em send us enough for a thousand rounds.”

Adam smiled. “How much is that?”

“We’ll know when it gets here. Carl, you sure you can melt the crosses? Pour the silver?”

Carl snorted. “Fuck off.”

Cat, grinning, leaned close to Adam. “Allow me to interpret. ‘Fuck off,’ in this case means: ‘Why, of course, Mr. Crow! I’m surprised you asked!’”

Adam smiled readily, but distantly. Cat noticed it. “You still with us?” he asked smiling.

Adam shook his head, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking.” He looked at Jack. “For over four hundred years… longer, really. But for four hundred well-recorded years man has been fighting vampires. And nobody has ever thought of using silver bullets before.” He paused. “His Holiness was right. You do have good instincts.” And then he blushed and sipped.

And when Cat saw that Jack was almost doing the same thing, he about laughed out loud. But he didn’t, thank God.

“Yeah… well…” mumbled Jack and then, abruptly, shook all that away and raised his glass in a toast. Everyone else did the same.

“Here’s to the great ones…” he began.

“There’s damn few of us left,” finished Cat and Carl and Annabelle and for a single instant, as Adam watched, a look of infinite sadness and… and what? Something else, passed between’ them. What is that look they share? wondered Adam. And then he recognized it.

Fatigue.

Bone-aching, soul-grinding tiredness. Because this job would never, ever, ever be over.

“So!” began Jack, suddenly almost cheerful again. “Tell me about the house in Big D.” The goddamn toast had been just a little too pertinent in this great empty house. “How many bedrooms?”

Annabelle offered him her empty glass. “Seven,” she replied. “And quite lovely.”

“There’s even room for Carl’s hobby,” Cat added, grinning wickedly.

Carl growled, drained his glass. “Hobby, my ass!”

“I’ll try,” replied Cat with an absolutely straight face. “But you have such a big ass. And I have such a small hobby.”

“Children!” snapped Annabelle, pretending offense.

“Right,” agreed Jack. “Enough of this shit.” He stopped mixing more drinks and came around from behind the bar. “C’mon, Annabelle. Let’s go get it over with.”

“You want to do the tape now?”

“Yeah. Let’s get it done.”

“But you can’t go under drunk!”

He gave her a hug and lifted her off the stool to the floor. “Young lady, you’d be damn surprised at the stuff I’ve done drunk.”

“Humph,” she said, rearranging her skirt. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“Hell,” Jack cackled, “I’ve even fought vampires drunk.”

She stopped, looked serious and school-teacher-like. “You have never gone to battle drunk.”

Jack nodded. “True. But if things keep on like this, I’m gonna start."’

And together, arm in arm, they marched in step from the room.

So Cat and Carl sat and talked to the young Father Adam to see what he was about. The first thing they discovered, with more than a little embarrassment, was that he considered them both to be heroes — make that Heroes. Heroes for Mankind, Heroes for the Church, Heroes for God.

It was awful.

Cat not only hated it but found it a complete mystery. This kid has heard my tapes and still thinks I’m a hero? Has heard all the times I was scared and all the times I screamed?

Hell, he’s heard me scream, by God, ’cause Annabelle said I did that once making a tape under hypnosis. And he thinks I’m a hero?

Cat fixed himself another drink and eyed the young man suspiciously.

I wonder if he’s on something, he thought to himself.

Carl was pretty much miserable, too. Not as much as Cat. Being base man got him a little less (but damn well not enough less) hero worship from the priest.

They learned a lot more about him. He was, for one thing, a good one. Adam was true Boy Scout blue, secure in his faith and in what it all meant and eager to do the right thing.

Maybe a little too eager, actually, but who knew if that was bad in this stupid job?

Born Adam Larrance, originally, in Berkeley, California, and infused with the “in” thinking of both that place and the new leftist leanings of so many priests concerning Liberation Theology for the masses in Central and South America, gun control, the death penalty, women’s lib, the two superpowers as synonymous and, of course, more welfare. But even with all of that, and the driving antiviolence that pervaded it, the lad knew just why he was there — to kill vampires. Just kill them. He didn’t want to “communicate” with them or get them government benefits or free mental health care or even try to bring them back to God.

He wanted them slain, purged, wiped out, wiped away.

He wanted them gone.

The punk had even learned to shoot a goddamned crossbow.

And yes, he did believe the silver bullets would work. And better still, he didn’t tell them why he thought so. It was close, but they managed to stay out of the werewolf business, too.

Then the kid did something else that surprised and confused and pleased them. He got up to go to the bathroom, paused, looked back at them and spoke: “I just want to say that I know I acted like an ass at the airport about the press thing. It was wrong of me. I humbly apologize.” And then he was gone to pee.

Carl and Cat looked at each other and frowned. They didn’t speak. Then Carl leaned away from the bar and fixed them both another drink. They went back to sipping and staring. Still, they said nothing.

Adam came back in shortly and resumed his place in the triangle. He looked a bit nervous and stayed quiet. At last, Carl met Cat’s eyes and turned to Adam.

“If you’re gonna apologize that easy,” he said, “you’re not gonna be much fun to pick on.”

Annabelle returned to tell them that she and Jack were up to date and Cat thought she looked damn good, considering. A little pale, a little shook up, but overall just fine.

Maybe it was better to do it drunk.

And then again, he reminded himself, she’s already cried for all of them once.

Jack was sleeping comfortably, she informed them, and would continue to do so for another forty-three minutes on the nose.

Aha! thought Cat. So it took you seventeen minutes to get yourself together before coming back in to see us. Still damned good, Annie.

And he gave her a little mental pat.

But he was still worried about Jack.

“Is he all right?” Cat asked gently.

She looked at him, surprised. Then she smiled reassuringly. “You heard him, Cherry.”

He considered, thought back. “So I did,” he replied and smiled himself.

“Who’s that?” asked Adam, gazing past them out the leaded-glass window.

They all turned to look. A young lady with light blond hair and rumpled clothing was walking rather stiffly up the walkway to the front door. She was trying, all at the same time, to smooth out her dress, check her makeup in a hand mirror, and feel her teeth with her tongue to see if they were clean enough.

“Aha,” announced Carl, lifting his glass. “The press has arrived.”

“The reporter?” Adam asked nervously.

“Yep,” Cat told him. “Looks like she spent the night in her car waiting for us. Or part of the afternoon anyway.”

“Bless her heart,” mused Annabelle. “She must want this awfully bad.” She looked at Adam. “Relax, dear. We just won’t tell her you’re a priest.”

“Naw,” offered Carl. “She’ll find out if she’s any good at all. Better just make her keep that part tied down. Off the record or whatever it is they call it.”

“And if she doesn’t?” Adam wanted to know.

Cat grinned. “Our father’s met the press before, sounds like.”

“Oh, I think she will,” said Annabelle.

“But what if she doesn’t?” insisted Adam.

“Then,” snarled Carl, “we’ll knit her tits together.” He drained his glass. “Behind her back. Somebody wanna answer the door?”

Somebody did. Cat fetched her to the bar and offered her a drink. She declined, looking nervous and flustered and…

And incredibly beautiful, Adam realized. Incredibly beautiful and incredibly vulnerable and something else, too, as Cat had said. Imperial. Regal. As though touching her was possible but a horrible sin.

It was very strange. Adam saw her no more sexually than any other priest but her aura was still unmistakable.

My Lord, he thought to himself, what a reporter she’s going to make! People would tell her anything.

He rose from his stool to be introduced. Annabelle called him simply Adam Larrance. Her hand was cool and her eyes warm and friendly but also penetrating and assertive. Adam wondered how she learned so much so young.

There was an awkward pause after they met until Annabelle patted the stool next to her and she took it. Adam, feeling unreasonably at sea, nudged Carl Joplin beside him.

Carl glanced at him, read his unease, felt it necessary to provide a little in-character show of tedium, and then proceeded to explain to the girl what Adam was and what it meant and what she could write about it — which was zero.

He did not mention her tits.

He didn’t need to. One glance around her and Davette saw they meant it. They were polite and friendly and they liked her (she felt sure of that) but they were also quite firm. Don’t write about the priest. She tried comforting herself with the thought that she had never meant to. But there was no way around the fact that it changed things that these people had their very own priest with them.

These people! she thought and sighed. She had never seen any group like them. They had a glow of health about them that seemed to radiate for ten yards in every direction. Not physical health particularly, though all save round Carl seemed fit enough. And not really mental health or so much emotional…

Soulful health. Is there such a term? she wondered idly. For that’s what they seem to have. Soulful health.

She rather supposed thinking yourself a crusader for Right versus Wrong would do that to you.

“Is Mr. Crow in?” she asked Cat. Cat was caught napping.

“Huh?”

“Is Mr. Crow in?” she repeated, smiling.

“He’ll be down soon.”

They talked about Dallas. They were moving there, and Davette lived there. She had come all this way across the country just to see them.

“It’s not,” she reminded them, “the kind of story you run into every day.”

They talked about restaurants in Dallas and people they knew there and famous Texans in general. It turned out Davette was Davette Shands of the once-notorious Oilfield Shands family.

“But that’s all gone now,” she assured them with a self-deprecating smile.

I doubt it, thought Annabelle. This child has been rich all her life and always will be.

And then she thought, I can be a little bitchy, can’t I?

Adam smiled in reply to the banter but offered not one word himself.

“Offhand,” offered Carl, mixing himself another drink, “I’d say the kid’s met a reporter before.”

“Do you believe all reporters are dishonest, Mr. Joplin?” she asked.

Carl grinned, sipped. “That depends on whether it’s a reporter or a journalist.”

She sort of smiled back. “What’s the difference?”

“Well, a reporter lies to get himself a better story and a raise.”

“And a journalist doesn’t lie?”

“Well, yes. But only out of a deep sense of compassion and concern.”

She laughed gamely enough along with the rest of them.

Not bad, thought Cat.

Annabelle checked her watch. Jack was due in a few minutes. So they all chatted some more before he showed and heard an odd story from Davette. Seems she had been the editor-in-chief of her college newspaper but had quit last spring, in the final semester of her senior year. Quit school entirely, as a matter of fact, and gone home to get to work.

“I needed to get off my… rear,” she offered with a patronizing smile. “I needed to get out in the real world.”

God! groaned Cat to himself. I hate to be conned.

The great oaken door burst open and Jack Crow strode in, looking fresh and invigorated and thirsty. While Carl played bartender he met Davette, shaking her hand firmly and telling her outright what a beauty she was. She seemed a little taken aback after all the beating around the bush she was apparently used to.

“You wanna talk to me, do you, young lady?”

“Why, yes. If it’s convenient.”

“It is for the next coupla hours. Then we hit the road. C’mon.”

And just like that they left the room.

Chapter 6

“What do you think?” Cat asked after they had gone.

“I’d like to know what she was kicked out of school for,” offered Carl.

“So would I,” said Annabelle.

“Please, God,” sighed Cat, “let it be prostitution.”

“It’s not the kind of job you can turn down,” replied Jack Crow with more than a little exasperation.

They were in the Zoo’s main corridor, leaning against opposite walls facing each other. Jack sipped from his drink.

“Why not?” Davette asked.

He thought about a reply, said, “To understand that, you’d first have to buy it.”

The young girl glanced briefly away then back to him. “Well, you have to admit it’s pretty hard to believe.” By God, I think she does believe! Jack thought suddenly.

Or at least she’s trying.

“What put you onto us, anyway?” he asked.

She smiled. “An old friend of my family owns the weekly newspaper that covered your last… uh, mission. I got into that little town, what’s it called?”

“Bradshaw, Indiana.”

“Yes, Bradshaw. Anyway, I got there two days after you’d left.” She frowned. “Nobody would talk about it by then. But I got your address.”

“Lucky you weren’t on time.”

“I heard you’d had some trouble.” He took a sip.

“Some.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“Seven.”

“Was it serious?”

“Dead. Seven dead.”

She went pale. “You’re joking! You can’t be serious!”

He just looked at her. “Okay,” he said.

They were quiet for several seconds. She could tell he meant it. And he could tell it had gotten to her.

Finally, he said, “Let me give you a little advice.”

“What’s that?”

“This is real.”

And they were quiet again for a while.

At last she said, “I don’t know what to say. Or do.”

He stepped away from the wall, shrugging off the somber mood.

“I’ll tell you what you can do. If you ever get this story printed anywhere — which I frankly doubt — you can put this in it.” He drained his glass and set it down on the carpet. “Got your pad with you?”

“Tape recorder,” she answered. She dug quickly in her purse, produced it, and held it up.

“Okey doke.” He stuck a cigarette in his grinning teeth, lit it. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

She smiled back, gestured about her. “It’s certainly a big house. How many bedrooms?”

“Seven too many.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, gazing down the row of empty rooms. Four on one side. Three on the other.

“Don’t despair,” he said. “It’s just eulogy time.”

And then he did something she knew she would never, for all the rest of her life, forget. Grinning all the while, chain-smoking like mad, he strode from room to room and in each one told one outrageous, impossible, hopelessly funny and (invariably) obscene story about each of its martyred occupants. Smiling, but unable to really laugh along with him, she padded along behind gazing, transfixed, by his every word and gesture.

Jack Crow cried easily, readily, as he spoke. But without choking or moaning or even allowing it to interfere with his own laughter. His tone went up and down, was pretend-serious or pretend-drunk or pretend — little boy.

She was utterly hypnotized throughout by his blazing pride in his lost team. No. She would never ever forget this. Jack seemed to enjoy it as well. And he seemed to understand her reaction for the compliment it was. He spent an hour and a half being animated and dramatic and hilarious and when he had finished they were both exhausted.

Cat appeared in the hallway and reminded him their plane was ready to fly and then was gone.

He turned to her and told her where they were going.

She said she knew. She said she was from there. From Dallas.

He said he missed Texas.

So did she, she said.

There was a long pause. Downstairs, rock and roll began thumping from somewhere.

Then why don’t you come along? was his next question.

She looked up at him, her head tilted to hear the muffled sounds.

“I will,” she replied.

And she did.

Chapter 7

They were having a drink or three in the bar at LAX waiting for their connecting flight to Dallas when two young coed types waltzed in wearing aquamarine shorts and deep equatorial tans followed by two boys just as dark wearing sombreros on which was stitched “Acapulco.”

Jack Crow, about to climb aboard his fifth jet in less than twenty-four hours, zonked by in-flight sleep and in-flight food and three or four drinks ahead of the Planet Earth, found this an inspiration.

“That’s what we oughta do,” he announced. “Go to Acapulco! Or better, Cancun or Isla de Mujeres! It’ll take a coupla weeks to get settled into the new shack anyway.”

“We’ve already checked our bags on through to Dallas,” Cat pointed out.

Jack frowned at Cat’s lack of enthusiasm. “So we leave from Dallas.”

“Naw,” said Carl, burping softly. “I gotta get all our bullet stuff ready.”

Jack looked at him. “Yeah. Well… But the rest of us can go. Annabelle?”

Annabelle barely smiled. “Who’s going to do all that ‘settling in’?”

“But the rest of you can go ahead,” offered Annabelle in her very best martyred tone.

Jack stared at his drink. “Naw.”

Annabelle smiled. “You may as well, Jack. You never do any unpacking anyway.”

Jack grinned back at her. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to be near you while you do it.”

“How near?”

“I thought I’d stay at the Adolphus Hotel downtown.” He looked at the others. “I thought we all would the first couple of days.”

Annabelle sipped and smiled. “If you like.”

Carl had his hands clasped across his great belly and was mumbling to himself. Adam, seated beside him, leaned closer.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, concerned.

Carl looked at him. “I don’t unnerstand it, padre!”

“What, Mr. Joplin?”

“Call me Carl.”

“Okay, Carl. What is it?”

“My drink.” He pointed to the glass before him.

“It’s empty,” Adam noticed.

“That’s what I don’t unnerstand! It was full only minutes ago.”

Adam stared, comprehended, grinned.

“Oh my God!” Cat all but shrieked, shoving his empty glass away from him across the table in mock tenor. “It’s happened to mine, too!”

And then Carl and Cat looked at one another and began humming the theme from The Twilight Zone.

While the others laughed, Jack held his face in his hands and shook it mournfully. “My Team,” he muttered. “Nurse!” he called to the young waitress scurrying by. “An Emergency Round.”

On the plane they gathered together in the first-class lounge to hide from the food. One more airline meal, Jack felt certain, would make him left-handed. So they sat and drank and played cards and chatted. Jack brought up the subject of Mexico again but in an odd way and with an odd look on his face.

“I used to work in Mexico,” he dropped briefly and then blatantly waited for someone else to urge him to continue. Davette complied and Team Crow wondered if she could possibly have known him well enough this soon to feel the oddness his eyes could shed.

Cat curled up in his seat like his namesake and prepared not to miss a single word.

What’s going on? he wondered, but said nothing out loud.

He didn’t have to, for all who knew Jack Crow were thinking the same.

And as for Jack himself.

They are going to have to know this. They won’t understand him otherwise. They might not understand him even then. Or me, for bringing him along.

But they’re going to have to know.

And maybe if I tell them the good part first.

He smiled and turned to the others. “It was during the initial phase of my government career.”

Cat frowned, said nothing. Annabelle spoke up. “You mean before you joined the army.”

“Nope. Afterward.”

“But you said the first part of..

“No,” he corrected with a smile. “I said during the initial part of my government career.”

“Which means?” asked Carl sounding as bored as he knew how.

“Which means I was under deep cover for the NSA on assignment to the CIA working as an agent for the DEA.”

“What the hell is all this supposed to mean?” Carl wanted to know.

“Well, my job was to check out the Cuban connection into raw brown Mexican heroin, so I was along the Texas border trying to find out if all the rumors about a big-time purging of the hippie smugglers was true.”

“Was it?” somebody asked.

“It was. They were wiping out all the amateurs to get ready for the big money they were monopolizing.”

“So what did you do?” somebody else asked.

Jack shrugged, grinned. “Got in the way mostly. It was a dumb assignment and a dumb idea to send me along. I liked the NSA but they didn’t trust me. I liked the CIA but they didn’t even trust each other. I was scared of the DEA and they hated me but had to take me because of orders from upstairs.

“It was a mess.”

He paused, looked around, and grinned easily. “But I did have an interesting couple of weeks.”

And Cat thought, Here it comes. He glanced around at the others in the lounge and wondered how they were gonna take whatever it was that Jack was trying to sneak up on them.

And then he thought, He’s trying to sneak it up on me, too. First time ever. Of course, there’s a first time for everything, so…

So why am I so scared?

And once more Jack Crow began to speak.

Second Interlude: Felix

Raw brown heroin changed everything. Those little doper camps used to be so cute, like a piece of the Wild Frontier. They’d camp out in the weeds somewhere in their motor-homes and the Mexicans would spring up a village out of tarpaper shacks to be close to the loose change spilling off. And there was quite a bit of that to be had. Life was pretty good.

I remember they used to string Coleman lanterns on poles for streetlights.

Playing undercover G-man, I left my weapons in the motel and parked my truck off the road before walking into a camp that night. It was one of the last really big ones and I could hear lots of shouting as I got close. But when I stepped through into the clearing there were only two guys there, both Mexicans, both drunk. I walked up beside one of them and said: “Qué pasa, hombre?”

He hit me.

Smacked me good right across the chops, my lip bleeding, then swings at me again and misses and the guy beside him starts yelling out, “Another one! Here’s another one!” And then he jumps at me, too.

They were both too drunk to do any more damage but that yelling brought reinforcements amazingly fast. More Mexicans started spilling out of the darkness from all directions, all drunk and all angry and all coming at me.

I ran like hell.

The wrong way, of course, that being the kind of night it was. Toward the river, away from my truck. I was lost in about two seconds, stumbling through the brush with Spanish obscenities echoing from behind. I had no idea what was going on except the basics: I was in deep shit.

But I was old enough. Old enough means I was too smart to try to stop and moralize with a meat-eating mob. There really are people out there who, while you’re trying to explain it’s not your fault, will pound you into putty.

I found the river when I fell into it. Well, stepped into it. The Rio Grande isn’t much but thirty feet across around those parts. So anyway, I step back and start shaking my boots dry and I hear this smartass voice pop through the night with “Hey, gringo! Where’re ya goin’?”

I probably didn’t jump over a mile or two. And I had already started to run when I realized the voice had sounded out in English, not Spanish. I spun around and first laid eyes on William Charles Felix, lounging in the door of an abandoned boxcar with a cigarette in his mouth, a bottle of tequila in his hand, and the biggest shit-eating grin you ever saw in your whole life. Had a World War II leather flying jacket, a faded blue navy work shirt, jeans, cowboy boots, and a Humphrey Bogart hat.

I found myself grinning back. Couldn’t help it.

I walked over and took the bottle from his hand and had a swig and asked him who the hell he was and he told me and invited me inside. So I propped a squishing boot on a strut and climbed up into the boxcar. It was even darker in there than outside.

“What are you doing in this thing?”

I could barely see his grin. “Same as you, Yankee pig. Hiding.”

“How’d it get down here by the river?” I asked him. I hadn’t seen any tracks.

“Got me,” he said, taking back his bottle. “Ask her.”

He struck a match and held the flame high. The boxcar had everything it needed to go from being a moving crate to a first-rate hovel, from rug scraps and cardboard furniture to a bleeding Jesus on the wall. Sitting in the midst of it all was a woman.

Just about the most aggressively ugly woman I’d ever seen.

Felix had lit a candle with the match after carefully pulling a battered blanket-something across the opening to shield the outside from the glow.

“Who is this?” I asked him.

He grinned again. “I’m not sure.” He sat down on another box, sent the grin at her, and patted a spot on the floor beside him. “I think this is her place.”

He made a gesture for me to sit down on another box across from him. I did. He offered me another sip. I took it. The woman came over and sat down on the spot Felix had indicated.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, unthinking, in English.

She said: “Twenty-five dollars American,” and wiggled her chest.

Lord.

Felix took the bottle back and sipped through his grin. “Interesting name, don’t you think?”

And we both laughed. So did the woman.

I lit a cigarette and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.

“What the hell is going on?”

Felix was enjoying this. “What do you mean?” he asked innocently.

“Why are we hiding?”

He lit a cigarette of his own. “Well, I’m hiding to keep from having the living shit beat outta me by the locals.” He took a puff. “And you?”

“C’mon, dammit! What’s going on? Why are they so pissed?”

He eyed me strangely. “You mean you haven’t heard about the Garcia sisters?”

I sighed. “Who the hick are the Garcia sisters?”

He laughed. “Well, let’s have another little drink and I’ll tell you.”

He gave me another sip, took one himself. As an afterthought, he offered one to the woman.

She damn near took his arm off grabbing for it. Then she started chugging.

“Don’t worry,” said Felix, watching along with me. “I’ve got two more bottles.” He stopped, looked uncertain. The woman was still chugging. “It’s probably enough.”

At last he took the bottle after about a fourth of it was gone and told me all about the Garcia sisters.

Sixteen and seventeen, respectively, beautiful, sweet-tempered, and, most important, virgins, which means a hell of a lot more in Mexico than it does in Texas. They were the pride of the area. A ray of hope in a place where the future looked too much like the past. Everyone loved and bragged on them.

And then they ran off to Houston with two gringo drug dealers.

“But don’t worry too much,” Felix assured me. “Tomorrow morning nobody will be after us or even remember why they were mad tonight.”

I wasn’t convinced. “What makes you so sure?”

He shrugged. “It’s happened before.”

There was a sound from outside. Felix had the candle blown out, his cigarette coal hidden, and the blanket-thing shoved out of the way in one motion. He peered out into the darkness, listening intently.

They were out there. You could hear their unmistakable mob clamor. They sounded pretty close. I began to feel a little claustrophobic in that boxcar. I got down next to Felix by the door.

“I’ve got an idea,” I whispered.

“Love to hear it,” he whispered back over his shoulder.

“Let’s run away.”

He leaned back in, smiling. “Normally, I would consider that a brilliant move. My first reaction, come to think of it. But where do we run?”

“How about across the river? We could bide out in Big Bend until morning.”

He sat back on his heels, picked up the bottle. “I can think of at least six reasons why that’s a bad plan,” he replied taking a sip. He wiped his mouth. “And all of them are snakes.”

I laughed. “Then what do you suggest.”

“Well,” he replied, closing the blanket-thing back across the gap, “if we stay here I figure we got a fifty-fifty chance.”

I frowned. “You mean they’ll either find us or they won’t.”

We had another drink. The woman had two more. We talked. The woman said nothing at all until, some five or twelve drinks later, she decided to change her name to “Fifteen dollar American.”

We drank and talked some more, about another half hour, before she decided to change it to “Five dollar American.”

Fickle.

Somewhere into the second bottle, after the third and closest wave of mob rustling occurred just outside, we, Felix and me, decided to make ourselves a pact.

We were clearly doomed, we decided. So the thing to do was to tell each other, in these the last moments of existence, the Major Truths About Our Lives, like passengers on a falling airliner.

Which is how I found out he was a drug smuggler and he found out I was a narc.

It’s funny now but at the time I was pissed as hell. Well, grumpy, anyway. Felix laughed, knowing, as per the pact, that I couldn’t do anything about what he told me. Until I pointed out to him that neither could he tell anyone else about me and then we were both quiet. And then we both had another drink.

And then we both said, “Fuck it!” in unison, and laughed.

It was fun.

What was strange about it was me being so surprised in the first place. I mean, what the hell else did I expect Felix to be, way out there like that? It’s just that he wasn’t at all the type or something.

Something.

Anyway, about then two bad things happened in a hurry. The first was that horrible woman deciding to change her name to “Free” and leaning back and pulling up her dress and spreading her legs so wide you could see her liver.

I swear to God it gave me vertigo.

The second bad thing was her husband showing up through the other door.

I’d figured the other door was rusted shut or something. The rest of the place looked like it should be, anyhow. And maybe it was, but ol’ Hubby just slid it open with a flick of his wrist and there he stood, all six and a half feet and two hundred plus pounds with a headless chicken in one hand and a bloody machete in the other.

Next to his wife he was the ugliest human I’d ever seen.

“I think I know how the boxcar got down here by the river,” whispered Felix from beside me.

I whispered back without taking my eyes off Hubby. “He carried it down here on his back.”

And then the woman, the wife, screamed and Hubby roared and Felix and I were scrambling around and that machete was slashing through the air flinging drops of bright red chicken blood and the candle got turned over onto the cardboard furniture and flames rose up and the woman jumped between us and the giant to protect her furnishings and Felix and I used that moment to basically run screaming into the night.

Except Felix stopped long enough to grab the tequila and I got my metal wristwatch stuck in the blanket-curtain over the doorway and ripped it off when I jumped through into the weeds.

Outside, the mob was waiting.

Not close enough to see us. Not yet. But close enough that they were about to and close enough that there was no way to get around them and close enough for them to see the flickering light from the boxcar almost immediately and start toward it.

Too damn close, in other words.

“C’mon, Felix!” I hissed. “The river!”

“Hell, no!” he hissed back. “The snakes!”

We were running out of time. I grabbed him. “Fuck the snakes!”

And then he grabbed me back, all calm for a moment, looked me right in the eye, and said, “That’s really sick!”

I just had to laugh. He was just too weird.

But in the meantime we were in a bad spot, stuck between two groups anxious to pound on us, and we needed a plan.

To this day I still don’t know how we got up that tree, as drunk as we were, and as scared, and the whole time giggling insanely. It was pure Looney Tunes, but we did it. It cost me a lot of skin on the bark, but Felix shinnied right up using only one hand.

He carried the tequila in the other. Incredible.

So we sat up there and watched as the mob and the monster came together. Reminded me a lot of Frankenstein, with all those lanterns bobbing and that huge Hubby roaring. I don’t think he was much smarter than he looked because he thought they were us for a while, hammering on a half-dozen or so before they calmed him down. Then they got about halfway organized and all of them started searching for us.

Never looked up, though, and never came near us, though I think they may have heard us giggling once.

They were very persistent. Kept us up there all night long. Felix and I spent the time swapping sips from the bottle and gabbing more about ourselves like we had before. It was dumb as hell, I guess. But it was also our tree.

I told him a lot more about Viet Nam than I’d ever told anyone else and was frankly amazed at his considerable knowledge and understanding of that war, coming as he did from the sixties generation. He told me a lot about what he did and I listened to all of it and couldn’t make sense of any of it. Felix only smuggled marijuana, though he had been offered fortunes to run heavier dope. He didn’t seem to make very much money at all, in fact.

He didn’t even smoke the stuff. Hated it.

I was about to ask him what the hell he was doing there when we got onto the subject of brown heroin and the Cuban connection and the rest of it. He confirmed everything we’d heard, including the danger for his brand of amateur along the border. His own supplier, he said, regularly used Cuban ports and Cuban radar assistance to cross the Caribbean. Or had, until Fidel had started going into business for himself.

At first I thought he was just being upfront and straight about our pact when he went into such elaborate detail concerning his trade. But then I realized that he was also taking advantage of it. Every time I would later run across this info I would have to toss it out and he damn well knew I would stick to it.

How? How does anybody know about anybody? Sometimes you just do. I told him about me. He told me about him. Nobody else’s business.

Our tree.

He was getting out that month. He wanted to live. He didn’t want to join and he didn’t want to fight. He was worried about his partners, though.

“They’re young and greedy and stupid and they think that kind of craving makes them tough,” he said once, cupping his cigarette coal against a sighting from the now-scattered posse. He sighed. “And they know all the excuses.”

I asked him what he was going to do and he said, “Nothing,” and I knew he meant it. As long as they didn’t involve him, it was their choice and their life.

It got very quiet there for a long time. Dawn was coming and the searchers had given up and it was a bit chilly until the wind died down. The last thing I remember was our finishing the bottle at last telling elephant jokes. Felix knew a thousand elephant jokes.

And then I woke up in the Rio Grande.

It was the sound, more than the water, that scared me at first. Splashing in from several stories up makes quite a racket. And then the water was in my scream and my ears and cold and moving but the sun was there somewhere and then I was awake enough to realize where I was and pretty soon after that awake enough to remember what swimming was and that I could do it. I lived.

But barely, dragging myself back into Mexico about thirty feet downstream, gasping and whimpering and shivering from the cold. I got on my knees on the bank and searched around for the tree and when I found it I started laughing again immediately.

Felix, dead asleep and drooping from the branches sunk deep into his leather jacket, was still holding the empty tequila bottle. And then I saw something else that made me stare. And think.

Underneath that jacket, my smuggler had a very professional-looking shoulder holster and inside it a nine-millimeter Browning. A couple of times during the raucous night before I had thought longingly of the arsenal back in my motel room and knew damn well I might have used it if I had had it — if only to warn them off.

But Felix had been armed all along and had never, I knew instinctively, thought to use it.

Not once.

Chapter 8

Jack Crow stood at the baggage claim in Dallas — Fort Worth International Airport gazing longingly at the bank of pay phones and rattling the change in his pocket.

It was probably too late to call the people he had in mind. Too late at night, too late in his career. And he didn’t much want to get involved with them again. What was that old joke? One of the three Big Lies? “Hi! I’m from the Government. I’m here to help you!”

But still, nobody could find someone like the old crowd. And God knows they were fair to me. Just let me walk away from it all.

He stood where he was, undecided, idly watching the others gather the bags. Annabelle and Davette stood chatting amiably on the edge of the activity, picking up all sorts of looks from the other passengers. Crow didn’t blame them. Damn few women looked like Annabelle at her age. And come to think of it, fewer looked like Davette at any age. She was really something to see.

Then he noticed something odd.

“Davette? Where are your bags?” he asked, innocently enough but absolutely everyone turned and looked at him and Davette blushed to her dress line and Annabelle trotted over to him wearing her “Hush!” look.

Oh, God, he thought. What have I done now?

Well! If he’d just be quiet for a minute, she’d tell him. It seems this dear sweet little girl has had a falling-out with her family. She, Annabelle, hadn’t gotten all the details yet but it was some sort of major blowup and the poor girl is just desperate and she needs this story and I know she probably won’t get it printed, Jack! But that’s not the point! The point is: she’s lost and alone and away from her family and she’s going to stay with us for a while, doing her job as a reporter — I’m sure she’s a dandy little reporter, she’s so smart — and then we’ll worry about the rest of it later.

Please? Please, Jack?

For me?

Jack absolutely hated it. He hated the whole bit — the girl, the sob story, the responsibility, Annabelle’s tone. But what the hell was he going to do? Annabelle had yet to be wrong about someone, and besides, what could he do anyway? He hated it. He just hated it.

He looked down at her pleading eyes. He was a foot taller and one hundred pounds heavier and one day, when he grew up, he was going to stand up to her.

He just nodded and slunk his ass away toward the taxis.

Shit.

Davette, visibly tense, watched him pass by. She turned to Annabelle.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“Of course it is, dear.”

Davette relaxed somewhat. “He agreed?”

Annabelle stopped and looked at the younger woman. She laughed. “You sweet thing,” she said, patting Davette’s cheek. “Did you get the impression I was asking him?”

The young night clerk at the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas’s rejuvenated downtown palace, had no better luck than Crow. Annabelle was terribly sorry they hadn’t made reservations but it’s just that they always stayed at the Adolphus — it was like their second home and one hardly makes reservations at one’s home, does one? Ha ha ha.

And the next thing the poor young man knew, Team Crow had its pair of connecting suites and Davette had her single on the same floor.

Everyone was starving to death so they ordered down for… How many of us are there? Six?… for eight steaks and big baked potatoes with everything on them and tossed salad and asparagus and a round of drinks, make that two rounds, and a half dozen bottles of Mondavi red… No. That’s eight steaks and six bottles of wine. Whaddya think we are? Alcoholics? Right. Thank you.

Davette further endeared herself to everyone by falling asleep twice. Once after her first drink and again at the table during the meal. Annabelle clucked and had the men carry her, still sleeping, into her room. The poor girl had been both exhausted and starving and, No thank you very much, Cherry Cat. I can undress her myself.

The next morning Jack Crow declared a holiday. It didn’t apply to Carl Joplin, who was going to be busy setting up his workshop and getting ready to make silver bullets and it didn’t apply to Annabelle, who was going to be busy screaming at movers and temporary servants, at least during the day, but everyone else could play.

And they did. Jack and Cat and Adam and Davette did Dallas in a big way for the next couple of weeks. The others joined them at night for dinner, but during the day they got silly on their own. They went to movies and amusement parks and go-cart tracks. They bowled. They golfed. They played tennis, hard, every day to stay in shape. They lunched, huge lunches lasting three hours and costing as many hundreds of dollars. They ran up an enormous tab at the hotel (everyone still slept there), paid it, ran up another, paid that.

In the meantime the house was getting ready; the vehicles arrived from California in time for Jack to get a DWI. He stood there, furious, while a twenty-year-old policeman dressed him down, quite rightly, for driving across a cemetery at three o’clock in the morning scouting picnic spots for the next afternoon. Jack was forced to renew his old acquaintances downtown before he really wanted to think about such things. The lieutenant he spoke to knew (unofficially) who he was and what he did and got him off but lectured him some more.

Jack shut up and took it and leased a limo the next morning.

In the meantime, all had their-own little chores. Davette went shopping with Annabelle once it was discovered she had only what she had been wearing. Cat chased and caught several women, at least two of whom had a sense of humor. Adam went to mass every morning.

And Jack made his phone call to the nation’s capital.

They were surprised to hear from him but not entirely distant. They said they would see what they could do. Two weeks later they called him back and gave him an address. He thanked them, hung up, checked the address in the yellow pages, nodded to himself.

During the whole two weeks they never once mentioned their jobs. Nobody said the word: vampire. Jack even stopped jumping whenever the phone rang.

He shouldn’t have.

The silver had arrived from Rome through the local see. The bishop was a new man who knew nothing about Team Crow or, for that matter, his parishioners. Persuaded by his aide that anyone with enough clout to receive a package from the Vatican through diplomatic channels was worth knowing, he grudgingly consented to share his sumptuous evening feast with Crow & Co.

It took less than fifteen minutes in his presence for Team Crow to know all the important facts about this man. He was cold. He was haughty. He was better than his flock, more cultured, more intelligently pious, more… how shall one put it? More aristocratic.

The bishop was an idiot.

He was also Carl Joplin’s meat. Carl’s and Cat’s. The two of them took rich delight in infuriating the man, pretending all the while to be unaware at how offended he was by their every gesture and semicrude remark. They had descended to triple entendres when the bishop had absolutely had enough.

He rose curtly and left the room, gesturing for the uniformed Father Adam to follow.

Adam loved the Church. He loved it deeply and fully, without reservation, both as an institution and as a vehicle for Almighty God. He loved priests also, knowing them to be as fine a collection of human beings as existed on the planet. Many times in even a career as short as his he had felt… no, he had known he had seen, in the shining eyes of some simple servant of Rome, the hand of Christ.

But this bishop was an ass and he ignored the man’s clipped demands for explanation and instead laid before him on his desk the pouch he had brought with him from the Vatican.

With a snort and a sneer, the older man reluctantly began to read. When he was finished, his face was pale.

It was worth seeing.

Suddenly (almost miraculously, thought Adam wryly), all was well. Anything the bishop or his office could do for them would be done without question. Why, he’d be glad to.

Right. Great. They all shook hands and left.

As much fun as Cat had been having, he hadn’t been neglecting his job, which was to fret over Jack Crow. Everybody had his own relationship with their leader and each relationship was close but none as close as Cat’s and everyone knew it. Cat found it strange that he received such attention, that his feelings of… well, approval, he guessed, should be so important. But they were.

For now.

Because one day, Cherry Cat was very sure, someone would stop by from the Home Office, some field man in charge of Karma, and inform him that there had been a dreadful mistake. We’re very sorry, Mr. Catlin, the man would say, but you’re not supposed to be here. By some clerical error, your soul was classified under Hero when it should have been under Intelligentsia. Let’s face it, Mr. Catlin, you are hardly the crusader type, now are you? You should have been a film critic.

It was bound to happen, thought Cat. But until that time, until they caught him, he was going to stick. Because he couldn’t imagine any other way that a fellow like him, a smartass and a determined coward, could hope to bang around these giants. So he would stay until they dragged him away. Just to be there. Just to see it.

He only hoped the Home Office wouldn’t prosecute.

But in the meantime he watched Jack Crow and he’d noticed an odd look on his leader’s face all night. He hadn’t joined in with their game of Piss Off the Bishop, hadn’t even seemed to notice it much. Something was going on, Cat knew. And it was something that he ought to be able to…

Of course! Mexico! That story he told about that funny smuggler guy. What was his name? Fre… No. Felix. Like Felix the Cat. Hmm. So. That was that look.

Hmm, again. When do you suppose he’s going to get around to telling us? Maybe he could use a feed.

At the moment there was no decent opportunity. Jack had directed the limo to Greenville Avenue, the American model, from New York to Chicago to L.A.’s Marina del Rey, of the Singles’ Strip. For six straight miles, ninety percent of the real estate was devoted to night life. Everyplace was a bar or a restaurant with a bar and all served steak and lobster and silly drinks with sillier names designed to sound obscene when drunkenly pronounced and all were filled with nubile young ladies, a terrifying percentage of which had received herpes from dirty toilet seats.

Cat moved through this place like International Harvester in the fall. Women loved his blond looks, his sly smile, his five-foot-eight build. Even the tall ones and that was okay because some of them were worth the climb.

But the bar Jack was taking them to was a lot different. For one thing, the name (the Antwar Saloon). For another, the clientele. This was a bar bar. No foo-foo drinks with little umbrellas for them. This was a place for men, mostly, where they could come and talk and do serious drinking without showering after the office. They didn’t seem particularly anxious to get new customers, or even happy about the arrival of six cash-carrying strangers. The waitress who took their order after they had filled up a corner booth seemed friendly enough, and she did her job quickly and well, but Cat could tell she didn’t care if they returned or not or lived or died. It was a nice place anyway. Somehow.

Cat glanced again at Jack, saw him surveying the room with that look strong on his features, and decided it was time for the feed.

“So,” he began cheerily, “whatever happened to that Felix guy?”

“Yes,” echoed Davette, who seemed genuinely interested. “I’d like to hear.”

“So would I,” said Adam, now without his collar once more. “Did you ever see him again?”

Jack eyed CM briefly, surprise and dawning gratitude on his face. He smiled and nodded to the question. “Yep. Twice more.”

Annabelle’s smile was a knowing one. “What happened?”

“Well, to answer that, I’ve first got to talk about Mr. Peanut.”

Carl frowned. “What’s Carter got to do with it? He wasn’t president then.”

“No,” Jack agreed slowly. “But the damage was done. Who else told the world a bunch of unshaven purportedly religious punks could mob-storm an American embassy and capture and torture the diplomatic personnel for four hundred and forty-four days and get away with it?”

Carl frowned again. “So what’s the point?”

Jack sipped and grinned. “That is the point. The whole world knew we lacked the one thing absolutely required to stop outlaws: the resolve to get the dirty job done. Without that, they knew if they pushed us hard enough and long enough, we’d back off.

“So they decided to murder DEA agents. One, anyway, so there would be a chance for Congress to whoop and holler and then do nothing and the agents themselves would see they had no backup after the second killing and quit. Not quit their jobs. Just quit doing them. And why shouldn’t they? Why be targets for people who didn’t care anymore about them than to say they did?”

“So what stopped it?” Adam wanted to know.

Jack’s face was hard. “It wasn’t stopped.”

Adam stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Read the papers much, kid?”

Jack snorted, smiled. “Don’t blame you. Anyway, they’ve killed five DEA men since 1983.”

“And they tried to kill you?” prompted Davette.

“Kidnapped me first.” Jack drained his glass and signaled the waitress for another round. “Which was stupid. Felix tried to warn me. He got word to me two days before but I had John Wayne fever or something and wouldn’t get out like I should.”

“How,” asked Cat slowly, “did Felix know?”

“They were his gang. Those partners he was so worried about, trying to prove they could make it in the raw-brown-heroin business.”

Third Interlude: Audition

They trussed me up good. Four of ’em. They took me right out of my motel room in the early morning during my shower.

Stupid, stupid, stupid on my part. Just stupid!

But not bad on theirs. They were fast and rough and scared and they had me down and wrapped up tight and then they pounded on me to show they meant it and then we left. At least they gave me my trousers.

Two hours later we’re out in some abandoned mobile home way out in the sticks and I’m tied to a chair at the legs and armrests and shoved up against this rickety old kitchen table like they’re going to feed me and then they sit down and shoot some more speed into their arms.

It was plenty scary. All four were Americans, all four young. All four wired to the gills. The dope didn’t even seem to affect them, so God knows how long they’d been awake and psyching up to do this. Two or three days at least. Maybe a week.

I was dead meat.

There was a fifth guy there. Hispanic, but I knew damn well he wasn’t a Mexican. He was cold sober and cold-eyed and dressed the way he thought American gangsters were supposed to dress. He chewed a toothpick and played with the gold on his wrists and fingers and around his neck. He was the one they were trying to impress. They kept offering him speed. He shook his head and smiled. Then he looked at me with a sly sneer of personal triumph. He suggested they keep the gag in my mouth. They did.

The moment came. They all exchanged nervous looks and then looked at the Hispanic and be looked at them as if to say, “Well?”

The leader looked a bit like Cat, thin and blond, and he licked his lips and nodded to the others and they all stood up. The leader reached for his gun. Two of the others did the same.

Felix appeared without warning in the doorway behind them.

“Knock, knock,” he said quietly.

They jumped like they’d been zapped by a laser beam. They spun around, cocking their pistols, or trying to get them out with jerking slippery hands — And I thought they were going to shoot him. Or at least shoot at him. But they didn’t. They recognized him at the last split second, and didn’t shoot. The air was filled with the sound of their roaring breath.

Felix, feigning concern, took a step back and raised his hands. He smiled. “Don’t shoot, Yankee!”

There was about a three-beat pause while everyone’s heart was restarted. Felix, still smiling, lowered his hands and strolled casually into the room. He stopped in front of my table and lit a cigarette. He regarded the blond.

“Cliff, you look like shit,” He looked around at the rest of them. “The rest of you look worse.” He paused when be came to the Hispanic. His smile remained but his eyes looked hard. “I see the company rep is here.”

Then he did a scary thing. He took one of the chairs abandoned by the others, the one next to me, and plopped down in it. He looked at me, said, “Hi, Jack,” and tapped his cigarette in the ashtray.

Cliff’s eyes went wide. He stared, took a step toward us without thinking. “You know this guy?”

Felix remained calm. “Sure. Got drunk with him a month ago.”

One of the others, a dark-haired scruffy one with tattoos, all but lunged forward.

“Did you know he was a narc?” be demanded.

“Not at the time.” Felix took a puff. “I found out later.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us?” the guy wanted to know.

“What for, Randy?” Felix replied calmly, looking him dead in the eye. “You told me you were getting out of the business.”

Randy looked like he was about to explode — embarrassed, ashamed, and worse, angered by it.

“You knew we were lying!” he spat.

Felix continued to eye him coldly. “Did I?” he replied with a faint touch of hurt in his voice.

It got quiet for a second, then Felix said, “Sit down, Cliff. Or shoot me.”

Cliff looked down at the gun still in his hands — a big monster .357 — glanced at the others, then stuck it into his holster and sat down. Randy sat down, too. But he put his Colt automatic on the table in front of him. The third and fourth Americans — one was fat and one had a beard — put guns away and drew up chairs on the edge of the circle.

They all kept glancing over at the Hispanic, who hadn’t moved but clearly didn’t like what was going on.

“What the hell are you doing here, Felix?” asked Cliff abruptly.

“I came,” he replied with a jerk of his head at me, “to rescue Jack, here.”

Then he smiled again.

There was a pause… and then everyone, save the Hispanic and me, started to laugh.

But it didn’t last very long. It couldn’t. The scene was just too hot.

“C’mon, Felix,” continued Cliff. “Be serious. What are you doing here?”

Felix smiled. “I am serious.”

And it all got very tense again. Cliff lit a cigarette with shaky fingers, leaned toward Felix, and spoke the way he probably thought real men do.

“Felix, look. I know you want to get out and I know you never liked this part of it, the smack. And we all understood that, didn’t we?”

And the other three nodded soberly.

“But,” he continued, “we’re moving up. We understand how you feel — really — but we’re going ahead. There’s just too much at stake here.”

Felix leaned back. “Let’s see if I can get this straight, here. You’re about to murder an American policeman for the privilege of going on the Cuban payroll to smuggle raw heroin onto the streets of the United States?” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and stomped on it. “And you call it moving up?”

Randy exploded. More rage and shame and hatred for Felix for making him see it. “Goddamn you, Felix! You always put things like that! You love putting things in the worst possible way!”

And Felix just stared at him like he was from another planet.

It was getting hotter in a hurry.

“However you wanna put it, Felix. Fine. That’s what we’re going to do,” said Cliff, trying to stay calm. “Now the best thing for you to do is just leave and… just leave us alone.”

Felix’s voice was ice-crystal clear. “You know I can’t do that, Cliff.”

And then he did a spooky thing. The whole time we’d been drinking that night I’d never noticed his shoulder holster and I’m used to looking for them. But he turned in his chair a certain way and suddenly it was exposed to the room.

“Let me put this so you can understand it,” he said in a gentle, dead voice. “I’m not going to let this happen. I love you all. Even when I don’t like you. But I won’t let you kill him. Look, I disagree with those bullshit drug laws as much as anyone alive but I will not let you murder an American cop just for doing his fucking job. Do you understand that? Am I being very clear?”

He sat back in his chair and looked right at Cliff. “Let him go,” said Felix.

Cliff exchanged half-glances with the others. Then decided to sit tough. “No,” he said simply.

Felix sighed. “Then we fight.”

Long pause. Cliff spoke: “Felix, you can’t really mean this. You’re not gonna do it — track us down to avenge some pig narc? C’mon!”

“I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stop you from killing him.”

Randy, wired up and all but hopping in his chair, said, “How?”

Felix eyed him. “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t let him go.”

Randy tried a sneer. “When?”

And Felix said, “Now,” and I thought he was the craziest sonuvabitch I’d ever seen in my life. There were five of them and he just sat there for a second and so did everyone else except Cliff, who stared hard at him and saw he meant it, saw he was serious, saw he was going to start it right there and then against all of them, all of them and more — it didn’t mean a shit to Felix. It was really going to happen. Felix was really gonna — And Cliff reached for Randy’s automatic on the table in front of him.

Felix shot him through the cheek, rose, shot Randy through his open gaping mouth already covered in his friend’s blood, shot the fat one square in the chest and blew him back, shot the one with the beard, who had managed to get his gun out and cock it, through the throat. And the Hispanic, the Cuban, who had risen frozen at the far side of the room, he shot right between the eyes.

It took three seconds.

Felix’s face was beet red. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He took his nine-millimeter in his left hand and turned to me, roaring, “I told you to leave, you dirty stupid motherfucker!”

Then with his free right hand he slapped me so hard my chair flew over backward and shattered beneath me. I lay there stunned and gasping for breath. When I looked over, Felix was vomiting onto the floor, still bawling like a baby, sobbing so hard it looked like it hurt.

After a while he stopped. He stood up, gun still in his hand. He gave me this kinda vacant look, then walked out the door and out of sight. He didn’t even bother to untie me.

I didn’t see him again for years. Until…